Our warm up was an Eggs-traordinary piece, where we imagined we had an egg - but WHAT would hatch out of it? Mine had a baby mermaid, but there was a multi-coloured dragon, a one-legged chick, a river of golden light...
Our second exercise used story telling dice. If you've not seen them before, they look a little bit like this:
Instead of numbers, there are simple pictures on each face, which you can interpret any way you like. So, for example, in the picture above there is an image of a house. That could be taken as a literal house, as home, a roof over your head, security, a hotel... Nothing is off-limits.
There were six of us, so to begin with we each took one dice ( there were six in our set - other sets have up to nine or you can add 'booster' sets.) and rolled it. We then listed as many things for that single image as we could. Then we rolled all six together and tried to plot out a storyline using all six pictures. I have to confess, I was alright with one dice, but got overwhelmed using all six - there was almost too much choice for me; I couldn't pin it down. Others faired really well though, including all six images in their outlines. What was weirdest was that the first story read out involved a trip to the opticians; the second, an optician who joined a dating site; the third, an online date that went wrong! Strange how the ideas sort of ran on as we went round the table - and yet there had been no discussion about how each of us were going to use the six different images...
Our final activity was in honour of The Bard. April is the month in which Shakespeare was born and also died, so I looked up how to write a sonnet and we had a go. It wasn't to everyone's taste...some of us are not keen on poetry of this type because 'it's HARD!' I've never done any Shakespeare, apart from The Merchant of Venice for CSE English Lit, so I was up for the challenge, but yes - it was hard!
We worked as a group, and managed to get the first quatrain (sounds posh - just means verse!) finished before the end of the meeting. Here it is...I might be tempted to complete it, later!
A (bit of a ) Sonnet for Spring.
From Winter's death a Spring is newly sprung
As first new shoots of green from ground emerge.
The day begins as liquid notes are sung
At Equinox, as day and night converge.
Interesting idea. I can imagine much laughter and smiles while doing this.
ReplyDeleteYup - we always have a lot of laughs when we share the results of our work...but it's really quiet in between, when the grey matter's working hard!
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