A word from Wim... (Dramacoach for Belgium).

Hallo everyone out there,
Yes, I am still alive, and want to report about our working process in Belgium, Leopoldsburg.

We have been working for five months now with the Group on the theatre project Opening doors.
We started with 17 adult participants, 9 people from the institution ‘Het Brugske’ and 8 people from ‘Het Berkenhof’. They all come over to the cultural centre in Leopoldsburg every week on Thursday. We meet each other at 9u30 and work from 9u45 till 11u45.
During July and August the Group was not always complete (because of holidays), but all the participants that started are still in the project and show up all 17 every week now.

Work in progress: what we did up till now.

This is (was) a new group. Some participants had an occasional acting experience, but nobody worked in a theatre process like this before.

First part of the process ( March – April) was pointed on getting to know each other. Who is everybody, what are the personal expectations, what are specific qualities and restrictions of everybody?

Second part we worked on basic theatre behaviour and working attitude such as working in chorus, listening en respecting each other, leaving room for creativity of every participant.
We also started to train basic theatre skills; getting to know and control the body, becoming free in using the body, using the voice and try to experiment, stimulating the fantasy by association exercises.
Every week we use these four different entrances (body, voice, fantasy and chorus) during the warming up.

Part three we worked on more complex drama competences such as tempo, dynamic,
storylines, improvisation on stage, dialogues. We also started to work on scenes with two, with three, with more players, parts of it to work out, other parts pure improvisations on stage.

Part four, we started to work with inspiration out of objects and we did open ‘the bag’ ( DE KABAS, a Flemish dialect word introduced by Ivo ) to pick out four different objects. The participants took them blind eyed out of the bag, we won’t tell you which objects yet.
We did drama and association exercises with these objects and improvised different scenes with always different mixed groups.

Part five; preparations for the presentation of our work in Malta. We worked out a drama schedule as a structure to improvise in with these objects. KABAS is the title of our presentation, so we are having a good time on basic musicimpro (clapping, rhythm, singing..) with this word an the sounds of the vocals.

This week, for the first time, we worked separate with the people who will come over to Malta (you find them on the blog). We fixed the drama line, we improvised on text and chorus work, and we will make some progress on this drama peace during the next three weeks. They surely will enjoy playing KABAS for all of you in Malta.

Best wishes and have a good working time over there.
In the future I hope to have some time to give some explanations about
- how we did this, (goals and method)
- who we involved in the project, and about
- the effects we recognise up till now

Warm greetings from Wim and the whole group of Leopoldsburg.