Theatre and Dance Previews

The Milestones Project is part of the Watford Palace Theatre's centenary celebrations. Its aim is to involve all the communities of Watford in all their cultural diversity and engage them with the theatre, giving them a chance to take part in workshops and appear in a production at the Palace in November!

The first stage of the project running through April and May is now well underway, with people from the local community attending workshops in drama, singing and dance and getting the opportunity to develop new skills, and share their own milestones with the community.

Communicate

In the third week of the drama workshops, we went along to see how they were getting on!

About 20 people had gathered under the enthusiastic leadership of Vik Sivalingam and Mahlon Prince to take part in games and exercises that gave them a grounding in important aspects of acting including learning how to listen to each other on stage and how to communicate and convey emotions.

Vik explained what they had been doing:

"Tonight we've been continuing on what we've done for the last three weeks which is to introduce drama as a means of communication, as a means of having fun and a means of playing" he said.

Milestones project - drama workshop

"What we've tried to encourage the participants to do is to just play! Today particularly we've been looking at non-verbal communication, physical communication. [We've looked at] how much you can tell stories with your body and how often words are superfluous and in fact we communicate better without words sometimes."

Boundaries

An example of this in action was the "Yeah Game". The participants had to construct scenes in which there was conflict that was eventually resolved.

Straightforward you might think - except that the only word they could use was "yeah"! This showed how many emotions could be conveyed through just one word.

"[The word] "yeah" can be casual or surly so just using that one word severely closes down the boundaries of what you can say" explained Vik.

"Therefore you have to find the tone of voice and the context to put it in - which they did brilliantly."

The point of all this of course, is to work towards the second stage of the project, a big show in November which will be created under the theme of Milestones. This show will hopefully involve a lot of the people who have taken part in the workshops.

Milestones

To this end, the workshop also involved discussion about the theme and what milestones mean to different people. Vik and Mahlon worked with the group to tease out ideas that might make a good narrative and stressed that what's deeply important to a person will make a good story.

Milestones project - drama workshop

"Hopefully what Marlon and I will do in these eight weeks is generate enough interest among this group of people in the community and hopefully they'll be interested enough to want to be participants in the final project" explained Vik.

"What we will hopefully do is give them the building blocks of drama and theatre but hopefully in the next couple of weeks maybe start to look at the theme of Milestones in their lives or in the community or in the world at large. And start to talk about what that means and build enough interest, so that by the time we come to the actual production in November there will be some ready made stories to be able to share with people."

So, are they're pleased with the results so far!

"Totally" said Vik.

"It's a fun two hours on a Monday, just locking the world outside away from us and coming and doing silly things like just speaking with the word "yeah"!

Relax

And the participants seemed to agree! Mum Liberty said it is a good place to come to relax and enjoy yourself.

"It's good because it's a creative outlet" she said.

"It's a way to disperse your energy in a positive way. For me it's really good - I've got two children so it's a way for the tensions of the weekend to just release basically!"

Zora agreed.

"[It's an] opportunity to meet new people, and there's a lot of self-expression, [and a chance] just to do things I wouldn't normally do. It's a good excuse to make a fool of yourself really" she laughed!