Here at Highly Sprung we have always seen ourselves as problem solvers. You want to make people aware of plastic pollution? Air quality? Teenage mental health? What do you mean your young people don’t understand the threat of microbial resistance!!!??
You name an issue, and over the past 25 years Highly Sprung have probably addressed it through performances and workshops. It has been a privilege and honour to create work that speaks to its audience and make performance that encourages people to sit up and take notice.
So why? Why do what we do?
In reflection it’s all inspired by the young people we work with at Sprung Youth. Each week we see them enter the Powerhouse, heavy with the burdens that life throws at all of our young people. At the moment it is exams; GCSE’s, A’level’s, and SATS, swamping our young people’s minds and stealing their focus.
For some of the young people we work with the exams represent more than just a qualification in a given subject, it is a judgement on them as people.
“I need to pass this exam or my mum will be really disappointed.”
“You don’t understand how much I need to pass”
…Ask most young people and they will never say that they are pleased to get the chance to demonstrate how much they know about a given subject. I believe that is because we have framed exams poorly with the focus being on what our young people don’t know, rather than what they do. Possibly one of the biggest hurdles for our young people is English Literature and in particular the Poetry Anthology.
Each Anthology focusses on different themes; Power and conflict, Love and relationships, and the newest addition, Worlds and Lives, all with poems dating back hundreds of years to poems written more recently. A glossary of poetic terminology has been created for the young people to study and, essentially give them the tools to deconstruct the poems. Terms such as:
Anapaest
Allegory
Volta
Enjambment
…Bonus points to those who already know what they mean!…answers at the end!
Now, I can’t see why so many of our young people struggle with poetry? Imagine looking at poem of around 10-20 lines, over the course of a couple of weeks maybe months, dissecting it, looking for examples of the above words… I’d be hooked!
Of course I am being sarcastic and, if we’re truthful, none of this should be blamed upon teachers, more the system in which they are having to work… it’s a problem.. ….and that is an alarm bell for us!… enter Highly Sprung and the problem-solving task force. Cue the cool soundtrack and the Highly Sprung team walking down the road in slow motion, waving to passers-by who have no idea who they are… but we’re confidently smiling and waving like heroes!
The first part of any project is to assemble the best team possible; former Birmingham Poet Laurette Jasmine Gardosi, Multi award winning composer Tom Haines, Warwickshire Libraries, and highly skilled performers who have a track record of creating engaging work with and for young people, Luis Dunn (Bravo November), Colleen Hedley (Out Out, Bravo November + Sprung workshop leader) and Emily Robertson (Tree, Urban Astronaut, Castaway, Grow, Accelerate… the list goes on!). Sarah was enlisted to direct the piece and Mark was to co-write it with Jasmine.
Researching the poems it was clear that they all had a common theme running through them; Power and identity. The same themes that our young people are faced with on a daily basis. The surge in social media use over the past decade, the pressures felt by young people to pass exams, the decline in the general mental health across the board, it felt as though the piece was writing itself.
Simile, another poetic term from the famed glossary and the title of our show, centred around three friends, 12 hours before their English Literature exam with one of them becoming the victim of online misogynistic trolling.
The project was shaped by a group of young people called the Co-Creation Group (CCG) who were charged with the task of keeping the piece relevant to the target audience of young people. The actors were re-taught how to take a selfie- the proper way, they were shown how to text properly and even how to interact with each other whilst their characters were speaking on the phone via video chat. All seemingly easy tasks and from the outside, they are, but what we soon discovered was there has been a change in culture within just a few years, so much so that the youngest performer at the ripe age of 24 was made to feel ‘out of the loop’ by the CCG 14-19yrs.
The Co-creatives also supported the writing with them creating content for poetry and challenging text that didn’t feel relevant to them. The process at times was gruelling with each side striving for the best possible outcome. Throughout the process, we shared a series of ‘work in progress sharings’ with audiences in Warwickshire libraries, hosting a community group as well as a GCSE drama group from a local school in the Powerhouse.
The show itself toured to secondary schools in Coventry and Warwickshire to students in year 10 as well as to students at The University of Warwick, and the feedback has surpassed our expectation.
Before each performance began I asked the young people what they thought of the poetry anthologies, much to the disappointment of the teachers, groans echoed in all locations throughout the school theatres. However within a few minutes those same young people had become transfixed on the performance, a performance full of poetry and spoken word, all desperate to find out where the story would take the relatable characters they were watching on stage.
The piece introduces spoken word to the audience slowly; The first bit poetry comes in the form of a short verse, silly, a little rude in places, and full of silliness. Slowly, as the piece progresses, so too does the movement and more importantly does the poetry. The penultimate scene sees the three characters only speaking through poetic voice, interchanging with each other, fusing the words to movement. The final scene, a monologue of poetry, delivered from a performer sat in the centre of the stage, speaking words that have been curated by fusing three poems together from the anthology; As I watched along with the 400 young people in the audience, you could hear a pin drop.
The feedback has surprised us all:
“Awesome. Thank you.” “Absolutely gripping” “This show feels like a warning“
“It was poetry but not like school poetry… You couldn’t take your eyes off it”
“I don’t like poetry at school but this, this was cool.”
“Wonderful acting really loved the inclusion of the poems and the repetition of poems helped me understand the characters thoughts even from a few words. Some really funny moments and also lots of thought provoking ones. Perfectly relatable.
For us, Simile seems like a milestone as we begin to once again make performance for the indoor sector. For our audiences of young people, Simile may represent a milestone of a different kind; a moment where despite their initial reluctance, poetry does have meaning, it is still relevant, and it’s a great way to express feeling and emotion both in performance and in life more generally….
…. Oh and it’s also, really cool!
…And for those of you still desperately trying to work out what the glossary terms mean:
Annapest – noun
A group of three syllables, where the first two are soft (unstressed) and the last one is strong (stressed).
Allegory: – noun
A deeper meaning hidden beneath the surface…
Volta: – Noun
A sudden change or shift in a message, mood, or topic.
Enjambment: – Noun
When a sentence or phrase runs over from one line or stanza to the
next.