Over the past two years, POINT have been delivering the Mind Matters group predominantly to year 6 pupils as they make their transition to high school. Mind Matters focuses on Emotional Intelligence and finding positive ways to find your inner strength, explore coping strategies, feel empowered, strong, embracing weaknesses and be able to empathise with others while celebrating differences.
Emotional Intelligence is an essential part of life. Building resilience and being able to have the confidence to change situations that young people may be faced with in their adolescence and adult years.
During these workshops, our fantastic facilitator Hannah uses form theatre techniques along with some seriously fun games which all make young people think about theirs and others emotions.
Forum theatre is a type of theatre created by the innovative and influential practitioner Augusto Boal as part of what he calls his “Theatre of the Oppressed.” Boal created Forum theatre as a forum for teaching people how to change their world. While practicing earlier in his career, Boal would apply ‘simultaneous dramaturgy’. In this process the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way. The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they were seeing. This was an attempt to undo the traditional actor partition and bring audience members into the performance, to have an input into the dramatic action they were watching. Eventually this ‘simultaneous dramaturgy’ became Forum theatre when audience members were asked not just to suggest different actions, but to come on stage and perform their own interventions.
Mind Matters fits in with the 5 ways to wellbeing by keeping us connected and reminds us to take notice of each others and our own emotions. It helps young people to keep learning new skills to deal with challenges they may face and giving to others, by actively listening to what people are saying and noticing how they are feeling.
