A Performance Including Education :: Drama

This task was to include education in a performance to be shown to primary school children. This performance needed to reflect on issues understood by children of this age and to be clear and straight forward while explaining the message. Three weeks ago we were set an assignment to last until now. This task was to include education in a performance to be shown to primary school children. This performance needed to reflect on issues understood by children of this age and to be clear and straight forward while explaining the message. My first reaction when I heard of this task was one of excitement and anxiety. I knew this assignment would be challenging which made me very eager to start as soon as possible. However I was worried as I knew that all ideas would have to be adapted for the age group and that there would be censorship issues. There were many ideas put in to a discussion on the first day of the task. Within our group these were our main ideas-Abuse, drugs, smoking, trust issues & bullying. However we knew most of these ideas were not compatible for the age group of the audience so we narrowed it down to three main ideas-smoking, trust issues & bullying. We knew that whatever idea we used we would have to make it humorous to allow the children to enjoy themselves. We also had some ideas on how to portray these ideas allowing the audience to understand and enjoy the humour. These ideas were- Men In Black(spoof), Batman(spoof) & Spider pants (original character made from typical superhero names and character). During the rehearsals we went through the different ideas and at first we decided to act out bullying through peer pressure however when we performed this to the group we found that it was very boring which was not what we were aiming for. So we then changed to trust issues using spider pants (we could not use men in black as we found out it had already been done previously we also could not do batman due to the costumes and props needed to make it realistic),However we were unable to carry out our idea of spider pants due to the unfortunate absents by myself and another person in the group & so when we performed this it did not come out right. We then eventually changed to a play about kidnappers. This entailed the theme of trust issues and was comical. It was not only the ideas that would not work though, we soon found that some members of our group were not prepared to work to the extent