Building the story

Actors can improvise according to a script written in advance or write the complete play and memorise it. In any case it's important that the topic is based on a real experience, something that happened to someone who is either present in the play or the audience.

In our sessions prior to the rehearsals, we chose the same story for the three different TO techniques. The stories were based on the topic stablished for each meeting in the outline of our project. These topics are: Disability, Poverty & Social Status, Cultural Differences and Physical Appearance and Gender and Sexual Orientation. Unfortunately, the last one hasn't been possible due to COVID-19 pandemic.

We mixed two different methods to encourage our pupils build the story: The caricature and The Pyramid Discussion.

The Pyramid Discussion

A pyramid discussion is a speaking activity in which learners create progressively larger groups while they carry out a speaking task that often requires each grouping to attain agreement before joining another group.

Example

Learners must agree in small groups on the most significant of the five senses. They then join another group and must agree once again, and so on until the entire class is involved in a single discussion.

Pyramid talks are beneficial in the classroom for practicing a variety of skills, such as agreeing and disagreeing, negotiating, summarizing, and putting forward an argument.

The idea of the caricature is to transfer the problems to it instead of a real person because sometimes we work with quite sensitive real issues and it might be easier for the person involved in the story to talk about a character rather than about themselves. We have to bear in mind that the story will be performed in front of an audience.

In this case, pupils must make decisions: if the cartoon is a boy, a girl, their names, and the problem they have. Everyone is given a piece of paper and a pencil and they have to think about their characters and their stories, real stories, which must be related to the main topic (disability, poverty, cultural differences, sexual orientation, gender, etc.). Then, the students are divided into small groups, aimed at choosing just one of their characters per group. Here is when the Pyramid Discussion starts.

Once the main points of the story and the characters have been agreed, we'll work with the same elements in the three theatre methodologies.