5 weeks with ROC Creative’s Tuesday Drama Group
Eleven Adults with Learning Disabilities
Three dedicated Staff
A group of mixed abilities
Mardi Da Theatre Co is a group of 12 adult actors with mild to moderate Learning Disabilities. They have been attending their weekly drama sessions for several years and have performed to the public in various venues. Playback Theatre was chosen to develop the individuals’ personal and artistic expression in order to explore the possibilities of sharing audiences’ stories who identify with a similar experience of being marginalised in society.
Mardi Da’ actors’ benefits and outcomes
PERMISSION
EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION
The trainers explicitly modelled giving permission to participants to feel their emotions in the ‘here and now’. Being emotional was given legitimacy and normalised. There are many positive benefits to the development of emotional literacy for the people we support, like, naming feelings, working through feelings creatively, being listened to and promoting compassion towards/acceptance of self.
The actors’ development of empathic responses stood out especially as an outcome because of the atmosphere of permissive emotional expression. Talking about feelings combatted a sense of individuals feeling isolated and elicited group support, uniting individuals from a position of “no-one understands me” to “we’re in the same boat”.
PLAY
Playback’s approach validates playfulness which encouraged actors to participate, explore deeper imaginative responses, musicality, their sense of humour and comedic emotional tones as well as encouraging them to use their physicality more keenly.
CREATIVE OWNERSHIP
It is clearly understood by the group that Playback is about them and their life stories. They love the opportunity to share and receive incidental feedback from the other group members’ post-playback improvisations.
Relationships between group members have been strengthened from creativity and role playing scenarios in which they rehearse saying/being/feeling things that perhaps they don’t feel confident in expressing out loud in real life but wish too.
ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT
- Spontaneity and ‘thinking and feeling on their feet’ has improved hugely.
- Physicality, facial expressions and voice work have improved, along with confidence to give things a go especially with instruments.
- The actors have retained the ‘tool kit’ for them to draw on in improvisations.
- The actors sense of timings, intuition & awareness of each other have developed giving scenarios a more polished finish.
- Telling a story, with features like a beginning, middle and end, tension/surprise using words/metaphor/music. Also learning to break with convention and over-laying events in a different sequence than they actually occurred – collaging.
