Womans Aid

My group (Kat, Bex and myself) have been a little slapdash recently, with so much work we had all put other things before this project thinking we had plenty of time on our hands, it was only this week that really any of us realised that i was Christmas.
As we had this Thursday off we deiced to meet early and get everything sorted, we knew we wanted to work with Woman's Aid but we had several questions to ask ourselves

• Why do we want to work with them
• What are we wanting to say
• Who do we want to say it to
• What is our venue
• Where abouts is our venue
• When are we putting this on
• What type of theatre will work best

After looking at all the questions, we looked back at Cardboard Citizens, we all felt that in someways we would be preaching to the converted if we were to try and travel round different refuges and also we were not sure about the issues that would come into that, there was a lot of research needed.

We all really like verbatim theatre and all agreed that this is the best way of telling a story that is so personal, and if we wanted to hit home to our audience, we needed really people, real stories and real words!

This is what we have come up with as a starting idea, that personally i think is quite solid, but please feed back on ideas or questions as its very easy to over look things with your personal work.

We are getting in touch with refuges and seeing if there are 3 woman who would be willing to anonymously tell us there stories, and make that a piece of verbatim theatre, then tour with it to different areas. We want to go to places like local WI'S (woman's institutes) in these areas and do a work shop, using forum theatre to see what there solutions are. One thing we did defiantly agree from cardboard citz, you think think there are easier ways out than there actually are. Allot of people say, 'I'd just leave him if he hit me!' That's fine for them to say, but whats about the years of manipulation and don't forget she wouldn't be with him if she didn't love him!

Once we have done this workshop we then invite them to a venue near by, ask them to invite family and friends to listen to the real life story and help support Woman's Aid, charge a small donation and put on a half hour verbatim piece the next night.

We also would like to take it to a male audience, see what there thoughts were. We talked about possibly taking it to a working men's club, however i raised the thought about it not being a controlled environment, what do you think? Instead I'm arranging us to take the workshop to (fingers crossed) The Leicester Tigers Rugby team.

We also said that if this was a company we would also in the future think about bringing in another team that looked at abusive woman, for the men's aid. But for now as we are 3 woman we just wanted 3 woman's stories.

I also have information on statistics, sometimes that can be as shocking to people, even more shocking than the stories themselves, its the knowledge that you don't have, like with how much a hostel costs!

I rang Woman's Aid and they were very nice and seemed very interested in our project. I am now in contact with two people at Head office who are doing allot of ground work for us. We have no split for Xmas and are looking into venues and dates to meet with people, Hoping that we should start touring after half term and finish end of March.

Very excited and feel like i have the buzz back of doing a project.