So couple of weeks ago or so I met up with 8 delightful writers and theatre makers for the second of our three Play Dates at Theatre in the Mill. The focus of this session was diversity – stemming from dual frustrations that I felt: that questions of diversity get left to an after thought rather than at the core of what and how we make, develop and programme; and that discussions of diversity became reductionist. Complex, multi-faceted artists reduced to their most obvious ‘protected characteristic’.

So for this session we were carrying on the journey of discovering who we are, what work we want to make and how to make it. We started with exercise of working in pairs to discuss:

1. 3 words that we’d use to describe ourselves

2. 3 words to describe how others see us

3. 3 ‘guilty pleasures’ or if you don’t believe pleasure should be guilty 3 favourite things

As well as a bit of an ice breaker, and fun exercise in working together, it was a great stimulus to conversations about identity, changing identity and how that impacts us and our work. Also generated an AMAZING recipe for a fish finger butty. Sorry you really had to be there.

We then moved on to working on stories – the story of us, the stories we want to tell, the stories about us. I invited everyone to pick a story, one about themselves, one they’re working on or one they make up now and break it into different events or parts of the story, sometimes also called story ‘beats’. We had quite a discussion on story beats – what they were and how many you need. They can be as big or as little as you like:

Girl gets mean stepmother and step sisters

Girl goes to ball

Girl runs away from ball, loses slipper

Girl fits slipper

Girl marries prince

Or

Girl wakes in morning

Girl opens window

Girl hears invitation arrive etc etc

They can be external events – what happens in the plot. Or they can be internal – what is happening within or between the characters. They can be scene by scene (most common), act by act, even line by line if you want to send yourself crazy. As ever, this doesn’t create the piece for you, but it does help you to understand and see what it is you are creating. Each beat of the story was written on a separate piece of paper and I asked everyone to lie them out on the floor. Brilliantly, not only was each story totally individual, each person laid out their story in their own way. This exercise created new stories, envisioned new pathways to the future, sorted out the structure for one piece and the back story for another.

My take away message from this session was first about how much easier it is and more fun working together than individually. And then, again, how completely individual we all are – and how our work comes from and reflects that individuality. More thoughts on that to come but don’t have time now to expand.

This Wednesday 3rd Dec is the last Play Date session at Theatre in the Mill where we’ll look at how the work actually goes on and how to survive while doing it. And just as an added illustration I’ve been attempting to write this perched on my bed while poorly son with ear infection plays amateur Transformers videos on youtube. Which is of course not at ALL distracting.