Sri Lanka, We Salute You!
So there you have it; Tie Dye Drama is officially back on UK soil and what an adventurous, challenging and (we think) successful three months it has been for our projects in Sri Lanka!
We're totally aware we haven't yet filled you eager lot in on our final reflections of our work on the East coast, so here goes...
At Child Action Lanka, our project was initially focused on using drama to develop the confidence and self-worth of the extremely poor children in the communities of Batticaloa, which was so heavily fractured by the Tsunami and long civil-war. During our workshops, we saw the children evolve from cripplingly nervous, and wary of our presence, to playful, comfortable individuals.
We felt we were witnessing these children experience the pure creative joys of play and imagination, all developed in a space in which their words, sounds, voices, shapes and ideas were appreciated and welcomed. It is a beautiful thing to create a world in which you can guide children on a journey through their minds; a safari, the seaside, a marketplace were a handful of ways in which we provided imagined spaces and, together, realised the characters that inhabit them, before giving the kids freedom to explore and become them in that unique way that only young children can.
It’s in these moments, when you can take a step back and watch them run with it, that you know you’re doing your job properly.Alongside a scary moment of learning how to cope with 50 screaming kids running around in the middle of a cyclone, ("oh but we had such an excellently-planned workshop on drama in a restaurant!!"), we learnt a huge amount with Child Action as well as being able to put our past experiences working with children to the test. We realised early on how effective drama games could be for teaching children English. We integrated different aspects of English language learning into the theme of each workshop, and used games as a way to consolidate this learning; often involving repeated actions and rounds, our drama games were a clever and playful way of disguising learning that could seem repetitive and disengaging in the classroom.A simple example was Amma's("mother's") footsteps. Each new "amma" would say 'hello children' and wave and in reply, the children would promptly shout 'hello mother/father', before the game itself (involving lots of creeping and standing like statues when amma turned around!) commenced. This exchange was usually repeated many times as the children became more confident with the English, switched roles and felt pride at knowing what came next. It was also an example of an exercise where they used their voices both individually and collectively (depending on who was playing amma and the children at any one time), highlighting the importance of simultaneously nurturing the individual and building a sense of togetherness and community, to our work.
As our fundamental aim for the CAL project was to develop self-confidence in the children, we felt that a performance was an important part of this process. At the end of the second workshop at each of the five communities, both the younger and older children performed in their respective groups. It was not a polished performance (because that’s beside the point!), but an extension of the roleplay acted out in the workshops and a way for the children to share their creations with each other. This idea of sharing through performance gave them a sense of pride, was an opportunity for them to recreate something they had built together, and also learn the fundamental rules of both performing and acting as an audience member. Each performance was different and we were so proud of every single child involved!
Our two weeks with CAL surpassed all our expectations. We arrived in Chenkalady unsure of how to approach a new project after the phenomenal success of the social awareness project with Tea Lea Vision. We didn’t quite know how we would create meaningful workshops with so many children, across 5 different centres, and with just two sessions per group. It was somewhat daunting, really challenged us and taught us the importance of a flexible facilitator who must be able to adapt and deal with any situation thrown her way! We realised quickly that we could spend an entire morning planning a workshop for two groups of twenty, perfectly split into age brackets and separate spaces, and then arrive in the afternoon to find a tree with ten kids of mixed ages underneath, and it would all go out the window...But instead of falling apart, we embraced the chaos; we became more intuitive, and allowed the children and situation to lead our workshops where they were meant to go and learnt to accept the outcomes as authentic representations of the essence of each community belonging to Child Action Lanka.
When circumstance means you can’t plan too much, you can’t have too many expectations, and you can’t (even subconsciously) impose your own ideals on a group, the work suddenly takes on a beautifully organic mind of its own. And, just as it should be, this mind isn’t that of four white girls arriving from afar, but encompasses the imagination and soul of hundreds of special Sri Lankan children.