The Boyd Report, Day 1

Fiona Boyd will be keeping us up to date with the goings-on in the BSR this week, as the Transition Year Actiontrack Showbuild project proceeds (performance on Saturday evening). In her first report, she writes :

10th June 2008 ~ Day 1:

The leaders this year: Nick, Nathan, Rachel & Richard.

We started by having a few warm-up games so the leaders could learn our names and warm our bodies up. Then we spent some more time playing some games in groups. One of these was “Zip, Zap, Bong” which is played in a circle and involves passing along this imaginary energy in different ways. Then our whole year had to move into the shapes of capital letters without being able to communicate in any way with each other. Then we all lined up from tallest to smallest and got paired off into groups where we mirrored each other’s actions.

And then after the mirroring we had to try and hypnotize each other with parts of our body, by making the other person follow the palms of our hands. It was all about controlling your body and learning how to move it carefully. Then we started to do the hypnotizing thing in threes and then fours and the fourth person would shout Stop and would then interpret our frozen frames. Nick, who’s like the main leader, wrote down the interpretations and then we were given say four ideas to bring together in a mini-improvisation play. After each group had performed we broke up for lunch.

After lunch we returned to write songs. After being given some key tips on how to start a song we split in to pairs and we were given a title, which had been a memorable line from one of the improvisations earlier. I worked with Lauren Meyler and the name of our song was “I look like him”. We wrote our songs and then performed them to the rest of our year. You could choose to sing or read the lyrics. This was a really interesting activity because everybody had to try it. At the end we handed in our lyrics to the leaders for them to work on.

Then later on in the evening we met for a music session where we wrote down the chorus to eight sings with titles ranging from “King Kong’s Playtime” to “You Don’t Hold the Rhythm my beating Heart”. During the afternoon the leaders had adapted and improved our lyrics to music. This was a really fun evening and everyone really enjoyed themselves. No one cared whether you could sing or not, and it was nearly more fun if you couldn’t. Overall our first day went really well and everyone is really excited about the rest of the week.