Verbatim Dialogue

 I think that the one word I can use to describe and explain this topic it 'art'. It is a beautiful to witness and produce, but it is also difficult to create or in this case, copy. Just like art, verbatim dialogue requires you to be creative. It is a creative process that in this case, needs you to produce exactly what you witnessed, without critisising any characters, but being able to execute an act that is clear when performed. It needs you to also think of the audience and how you can convey messages or meaning to them. It is not explicit as you do not mention the names of the characters and what the dialogue witnessed was about, the audience needs to be able to grasp these ideas from the performance.

Just like instructed, I evesdropped on a conversation I heard in the school bus. It was easy to stay in character and not engage since these were strangers and I was sitting in the seat in front of them, with my headphones on. They were discussing the recent email we got from the Education School Counsel about reshuffling of the examination timetable since other students, mainly first years, were complaining that the exams are too close together. It was interesting to hear the view of the other girl who thought this was unfair because it was common in the past years that this happen and the first years would have to get used to it too. Transcribing this conversation was a bit easy because I understaood every part of their conversation since they were using a language that I understood, but the challenge was that they spoke very quickly. This is my transcription:

  This activity made me realise that drama in general, lies in your ability of being able to convey a message the way it is. This also applies in learning, especially in and through drama. When we teach, we need to teach the learners the content that is required the way that it is, without critisising it, but also allowing them to be critical thinkers. They should be able to detect and identify underlying content without being told to. In verbatim theatre, we need to give trhe audience a production of what happened, but we also need to allow them to find clues and think of the underlying aspects themselves. There is no narration, therefore, the viewer needs to figure out what is happening, where are these people, and what is the intention of the character. In our lessons, we can also use verbatim theatre as message coneying tool that allows our learners to critically think about what they are watching, without being told to.

In this lesson for example, the learners were supposed to act out a dialogue. This dialogue was a drama story that was supposed to teach them about safety. They were not told that this story is about safety but they had to figure out how to get their friend to safety when he got injured. This was important content that they had to mainly learn about, they had to pick it out from the scene and what they had to do there. When assessing the learners, we had to ask them how they got their friend to safety and what trhey thought was unsafe about the way in which the boys were playing. All this was asked in the assessment, but was not explicitly discussed or mentioned in the dialogue and drama.