Project Week One - July 17th & 18th

St Mary’s Primary School

Acknowledgement of Country

Our school sits beside Lake Colac at the foothills of Red Rock and on the lush green land that has been cared for by generations of the Gulidjan people from the Maar Nation. Today we recognise their long history with this beautiful land we call home. We will always remember that our community learns, grows and plays upon traditional Gulidjan land and we pay our many respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Together we touch the ground of the land (touch ground)

We reach for the sky that covers the land (raise hands)

We touch our hearts to care for the land (touch our hearts)

Physical Theatre games run by Laura

Hello - Penelope here. Normally I'd start a blog entry with a list and description of what went on, but, I think that Callum's reflection details the feel of what we did, what the children experienced, and how the work might progress. Jason, Laura and my own follow Callum's, and peppered through out the text are photos of the residency across the two days.

Artist’s Reflections

Callum (with Penelope's artistic director notes in italics)

Day One’s focus was two-fold, we had to introduce the students to us, and then slowly introduce some of the concepts we’d be exploring over the next few weeks (intentionally structured to lead us into and towards our final outcome). This process ended up being much easier than I had expected. We opened with drama games, run by Laura, which the students adored. (Laura injected her own very imaginative style into these warm-up drama/physical theatre games making things extra engaging). There was a lot of positive feedback to the food-based action game, in which the students were to follow a set of actions allocated by a food variety, and then got to make their own. Melting Chocolate was my personal favourite. It was during this exercise that it became clear that we had an exceptionally enthusiastic and excited cohort. Every student had ideas for different foods and actions, and were hell-bent on sharing, which is such an amazing sight to see. I know that as facilitators our job is to empower the students to feel confident in engaging with art. But so far working on this project, I’ve been blown away by how much the kids enthusiasm empowers us as facilitators/artists. It’s hard not to feed off that excitement and energy.

Callum and Laura working with the students

After the break we moved onto a visual art exercise called "Exquisite Corpse", which Jason ran. I had assisted on a similar exercise on another project "Black Rock Phantasmagoria" in 2022 with Barking Spider. I like that when you shorten Black Rock Phantasmagoria it's "BRP" - which from here on out I’d implore you to pronounce as ‘burp’. Having done this before, it made it easy for me to assist. Exquisite Corpses are always incredible and bring out so much joy. The final creature always looks so weird and wonderful, and never fails to make everyone laugh. Seriously, if you’re ever concerned someone in your life has been replaced by a robot or has become a host for an alien parasite, don’t freak out, just calmly invite them over for a dinner party and have your guests play an Exquisite Corpse. If they don’t laugh, I’m sorry, but you may have a Blade Runner/The Thing situation on your hands, so I hope you informed your other dinner guests of your plans because their assistance will be required. Thankfully, we had no such robots/alien parasites in the class, as everyone laughed very hard at their final creations. From there, the students were asked to give their creatures names, ages, hobbies, habitats and other defining features in order build character and story. Once again, the students loved fleshing their creatures out, and the final presentation was as joyous as the act of creating. My personal favourite was Barhartoney. I think it sounds like the name of a long-forgotten Tiki Cocktail creator from the early 1950s, and I like to think, that like the creature itself, he too lived in a McDonalds dumpster.

Exquisite Corpse Drawings

The final session was spent making "Tableaux". (A Tableaux or sometimes known as a "Tableau Vivant" is a when group of (in this case) students collaborate to use their bodies represent all the elements to make up a scene). The students' enthusiasm to participate has come as a shock to me, but will surely become less surprising as the weeks go on. Of course, the enthusiasm depended on the task. Some students loved the drama games and would jump on any opportunity to perform to their peers. Others loved the drawing exercises, and some the storytelling, (Penelope ran an interactive story session with the kids after Laura's drama games) but across the board, almost every student was engaging and exploring everything we were throwing at them.

We combined the Tableaux with some soundscape work, which I ran. (Callum used elements and techniques of of body percussion to generate different soundscapes - these were really evocative, and it was great to see the children invent and work collaboratively. The combination of the sound work to the Tableaux shifted the way children experienced what they were seeing, and what they were hearing. By combining art forms in unexpected ways, the children are learning new ways to think, explore and imagine). It went well and was a fun introduction to sound work. I’ve been very interested in finding new ways to implement and explore sound during these projects. I haven’t quite worked out that secret formula, but we’re getting there. Regardless, it’s always good to experiment, and often failure can be as fun as success, and whilst it feels like the sound exploration is still finding its legs, at least the student are having fun.

Thaumatrope instructions.

HOT TIP: Callum is somewhere in this photo...

Day Two was a good practice in adjusting on the fly. Our plan had been to start with some drama games followed by a sound walk. However, the weather was not as pleasant as it had been on day one, meaning we had to adjust our tact. We ended up taking the sound walk in the final session, which worked in our favour as it meant we got to have a longer, richer sound walk than we would have initially.

Three-Panel Storyboards

The session began with some drama games, run by Laura. After this, Penelope asked the students to create three panel storyboards, using pictures only (no dialogue or text), to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. Once again, they loved it. Once completed, we expanded the scope of the exercise to create tableaux of some of the stories, they were more than eager to jump up and create. (Run by Laura - and the intention of taking the 2 dimensional storyboards into the physical realm was to enable children to make connections through kinisthetic learning). One student had the spectacular idea to have the tableaux of a person climbing a tree laid on the ground, as to be viewed from above, which had he advantage of being much safer than having students attempt to climb on one another. For me, it’s always incredible (and a relief) when you get to empower the students to share their ideas and actively engage in the areas of direction or writing, especially when they’re accounting for safe performance practices. We love developing the skills to build safe arts spaces early, as it becomes and evermore important skill to have in not only the art scene, but in life in general.

The second session was spent making Thaumatropes, an early predecessor to what would become animation. (The children really responded to Jason's instruction, and there was some highly original and sometimes complex creation). Oh boy did the students looooooove these things. I remember being absolutely obsessed by visual illusions as a child, and it’s heart-warming to see that this love for the visually surreal continues throughout the generations. I think the beauty of the Thaumatrope is that it is fairly easy to construct, which meant some students made two or three during the session. Some students also began experimenting with simple animations, (which will lead us into creating stop-motion animation in a couple of weeks) with one student creating a thaumatrope that showed a spinning fan. Look, it was a hit, there’s not too much more to say without repeating myself. The kids loved every element of the thaumatrope. They get a lot of enjoyment out of creating things for themselves. I also noticed some students really engaging with the construction side of this session. Hopefully the final outcome will be able to incorporate elements constructed by the students themselves. (We are planning to have a gallery of works created across the residency as part of the final outcome showing event)

Finally, we had the sound walk, which I led. Sound walks are fun and can be quite meditative. If I’m being honest though, I’ve never been on a sound walk with 50 grade 5’s before. Now some may see that as a recipe for disaster, and I’ll be real, I had my concerns initially, but the students engaged with it really well. We walked through the botanic gardens and down to Lake Colac. Sitting under a rotunda, we listened to the sounds that surrounded us, close-by and far away. The walk to the rotunda was a bit noisy, which was to be expected. The students were excited by the act of leaving the school grounds and by the discovery of a large group of bats that had gathered in the trees. Once at the rotunda, the students settled down and identified a large variety of sounds.

Children's observations of the sounds they heard on the Sound Walk

Upon returning to the school, the students were asked to write down the sounds they’d identified on a large roll of paper, and after that we made a large sound collection by combining the groups findings onto one big list. The students identified a lot of different nature sounds, including a large variety of bird calls. The specificity with which they listed their sounds, especially the knowledge of bird species was incredible, and helped us created a rich and expansive sound tapestry.

Sounds observed and categories:

Creatures with wings

· Swamp hens stomping in the water

· Black crows squawking

· Plovers

· Chirping magpie

· Wattle birds

· Ducks quacking

· Green and red parrots flapping

· Bats squealingNature

Elemental

· Wind

· Mud

· Trees brushing against themselves

· Water sloshing

Human

· Breathing – exhaling

· Feet crunching on gravel

· Whistling

Mechanical

· Sirens

· Motorbikes and cars

Moving forward, I would have the students lie in the classroom and run a sound focus exercise, almost like a meditation, as Penelope suggested. This would help the students begin to identify close and far sounds, before going on a sound walk which puts these skills to the test.

Students writing the sounds they's observed

All in all, I’m excited to continue working on this project. I can’t wait to see what other developments the students make and the areas we begin to explore and develop. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Jason

Day 1: Today my main focus was on delivering the exquisite corpse session in today's activities. I must admit I was rather rusty with dealing with the year five children and possibly needed to assume more knowledge than I did. I was impressed with their ability to understand the words exquisite and the word corpse and that the combination of the two was in itself an exquisite corpse. We ran two sessions the second session was more streamlined after receiving feedback from Penelope and the children made great collaborative work and their response is to describing their creature’s greater environment was detailed and inventive.

Day 2: Today my main focus was on delivering the Thaumatrope exercise. I had spent some time developing the prototype so that the teaching session would be efficient. This time I assumed greater knowledge in the students and one student even knew what the word Thaumatrope meant. Once again the second session was an improvement on the first session we became more efficient in our assembly line and 95% of children achieved an effective creation.

Laura

The energy, creativity and imagination the year 5 students displayed throughout the first two days has made me incredibly excited to develop this project together. I am particularly looking forward to continuing our exploration of physical storytelling and the ways we can devise tableaux and movement to explore place, narrative, and character. Having a ball so far! Bring on day 3 and 4!

Penelope

I couldn't be happier with everything about the start to this project. We are at the right school, with an amazing cohort of children, lovely, warm teachers and staff - and a BIG shout out to Lynne Richardson who is responsible for the project at the school. The Barking Spider Creative team is a good combination of artists who are seasoned at working with kids (Laura and Penelope) and two feeling rusty (Jason and Callum). The point of this project as artists is the co-learning and artistic sharing, and across the two days it's already evident that the rust is truly wearing off.

The other artists have really well articulated the children's experiences across the past two days. I will add that it is such a delight for me to not know what we are going to create, and to encourage others around me that the "not knowing" is ok. This is mostly teachers and other artists. I am encouraging the artists to take creative risks - I know I am. I had an epic fail on day 2 with a terrible sound and tableaux experiment. It just didn't work - I created a schammozzle! But easily moved on from and no big deal.

I love these Creative Learning Partnerships because EVERYONE is learning as we experiment.

The residency is programmed such that, each session, day and week, we skill-build and create, with carefully chosen creative exercises that give us the strong foundation we need to germinate and then present our final outcome. The experimental phase is my favourite, because as we get to know each other creatively and as we explore ideas, we are nourishing the material that will evolve into the next step, and then the next.

CLICK HERE to see Day 1 Plan

CLICK HERE to see Day 2 Plan