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My name is Crona Lynch and I am project manager
of the Spring Chickens program which is with the Big Telly Theatre Company and the
Atlantic Philanthropies.
Spring Chickens is a two-year outreach program and it is for older people
throughout the whole of Northern Ireland.
The program came about because we did a lot of productions and we did
some outreach work with older people and the feedback that we got back was
just amazing, lots of them telling us why they absolutely loved it, they've never had
anything like it, they would love to do this again, the idea is that we will
apply different art forms to the same group, so we'll give them little "tasters" if
you like, of every art form and because we are a theatre company the art forms are
all theatre arts, but we've covered things like circus skills and magic
and drama, multimedia, we've worked with cameras with them we've done a little bit of
design work
so although it's theater the type of work Big Telly as a company does
is very visual so we bring in every form of the arts into our productions
so therefore we do that in our workshops also. My name is Stephen Beggs
and I
am a workshop facilitator
and I'm an actor
and theater director, and a stage manager, and in this particular workshop today I
have put together a series of exercises which actors will quite often use in the
rehearsal room to get to know each other better, build confidence, break down
barriers like the social embarrassment we feel when we enter a room.
First of all they're working in three little groups
so they have to very much make sure that they rely on each other in their
group they also have to make sure that no one in their group is left out so
that it's very much to do with
group
interaction
and the way the group functions. This could be a shield, when you're fighting someone,
it could be lots of things, when you're driving your steering wheel in your car,
Will you stop giving them all their ideas?
(laughter)
Coming together
in such a socially interactive way, I think it's a great way of stimulating
people and keeping people active in keeping people on their toes and keeping
people creative as well and hopefully they're going to work towards
presentation and performance
where they will have that great satisfaction of having created something
which they can show off to people, so they get the chance to perform and have their
performance recognized and appreciated and um...
and it will lead to that on a larger scale with a performance at the end.
The response is just amazing, just today even after today's workshop
I read over some of the feedback forms that were handed back to me and I had to go and grab a tissue
because the response is just so great , we've had lots of people
say thank you so much for taking the time out for us and putting the money
into us and they just don't expect all of that they're just
people here who are not used to grabbing, grabbing, grabbing like
the younger society today tend to do that, and kids get everything handed to them so
they're just fantastic responses.