Introduction to verbatim theatre

 This day was more than ordinary, considering that I hadn't intentionally exercised in more than three months. It felt fun and energising, but also straining on my muscles. We started with stretches, then did some activities that we are familiar with to get our bodies moving and interacting with other individuals. We did the activity where we found the people that we were born in the first month with and stood with them in groups. Then we did lines with people who drink the same amount of water as we do. 

These are some of the activities that make me realise that it is important to warm up before we start our lessons. No matter how fatigued we might feel, we need to get our minds back into our bodies and in the space that we are in. This is a strategy I intend to implement in my classroom.

Today we learnt about newspaper theatre. What I got from this lesson is how we can take reported or experienced information and transfer it into visual and verbal representations while adapting to the specific audience. We did a thing where we walked around the room and called out names of newspaper articles we could recall, then froze to represent them in an image. It was like the game of charades, except this time, it was telling a story, and you could use words.

We split into groups and acted out a newspaper article we chose. This took me back to the time we had the theatre group in block 1 (sorry, I forgot their name), where they asked us for a story, then they brought it to life. We had to improvise and use what is in our minds and bodies to transfer the stories to the audience. This shows me that in a classroom or any other space with an audience, there are creative and entertaining ways to convey content the way it is. In my foundation phase class of learners, I can easily take any topic and make it an interactive story for the learners to understand. There was a time last year when I used this strategy to teach a Life Skills lesson. I turned the content into a dialogue, then instructed some of the learners to act it out. Those who were acting seemed to understand more, and I believe it is because they had been involved in the activity.

Both the audience and the content of the newspaper matter in how you convey your story. This takes us to what we discussed next, verbatim. We spoke about how important it is for you to be able to hear or witness a story and be able to act it out to an audience exactly the way you saw it, without explicitly exposing or criticizing those involved in the conversation. We were told to eavesdrop on a conversation and write it down, then come and represent it in class. This goes back to the fact that we can take any kind of information from somewhere else and convey it with understanding to a different audience, in this case, our classrooms.