TEACHER RESOURCE PACKIT’S HOT, IT’S NOT FOR TEACHERS WORKING WITH PUPILS IN NURSERY - YEAR 1

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A Unicorn Production in association with Reckless Sleepers

IT’S HOT, IT’S NOT By Reckless Sleepers

FROM SAT 2 FEB - SUN 10 MARCH 2019FOR PUPILS IN NURSERY - YEAR 1

WEATHER THE WHETHER.

Why is it that sometimes I’m hot but you’re cold? Why are there puddles and

sometimes not? How can it be sunny and rainy all at once and also not at all? And if

it’s summer here, why is it winter there?

Reckless Sleepers are an extraordinary company who make work somewhere

between visual art, dance and theatre. This surreal, funny and carefully crafted

physical performance explores the weather in all its forms and takes delight in how

we experience it differently wherever we are.

Duration: Approx 50 minutes

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CONTENTSINTRODUCTION p. 4

ABOUT THE PLAY p. 6

MAKING THE PLAY: INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR MOLE WETHERALL p. 10

DRAMA ACTIVITIES p. 23

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE TEACHING SEQUENCES WHICH WILL BE ADDED TO THE PACK IN DECEMBER 2018

TEACHER RESOURCES

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INTRODUCTIONThis resouce pack is created for teachers bringing pupils to see It’s Hot, It’s Not at the Unicorn Theatre in the spring of 2019.

This pack offers a brief introduction to the play, which is being devised by Reckless Sleepers and will be completed in rehearsals in the new year. It also includes an interview with Mole Wetherell, who directs and also performs in the play, giving an insight into the ideas and creative processes that will form the piece.

The classroom activities, which will be added to the pack by December 2018, will be designed to support and extend your pupils’ visit to the theatre and offer ways for teachers to pick up on and explore the themes in the play, both before and after a visit. The activites will use drama, games and art activites as ways of exploring ideas that are relevent to the play and to children’s lives.

Resources support the EYFS framework and explore the following characteristics for effective learning: playing and exploring, active learning and creating and thinking critically. There are links to the key areas of learning at the Foundation stage: personal, social and emotional development, communication and language, physical development, expressive arts and design and understanding the world.

At Key Stage One, the resources and theatre visit will have particular relevance to spoken language, writing and science, as well as supporting the social and emotional aspects of children’s learning.

TEACHER RESOURCES

CPD: MON 21 JAN, 10AM - 4PMThere will be a free teacher CPD day for It’s Hot, It’s Not, a chance for teachers to find out more about the show and gain practical experience of the accompanying scheme of work and classroom activities before leading them with a class. For more information or to book your place, email schools@unicorntheatre.com.

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ABOUT THE PLAYIt’s Hot, It’s Not is a new, devised theatre piece by Reckless Sleepers, a performance theatre company which combines physical theatre, dance, sound and visual art elements; their new work, It’s Hot, It’s Not, will provide its audience with a playground for the imagination.

Structured loosely around the four seasons, the piece will move from summer to autumn, to winter, to spring. Elements of the weather will be staged by the company, but all might not be what it seems with the predictability of the seasons upended; things turned on their heads; the outside experienced inside, and the inside outside.

Reckless Sleepers create highly visual, inventive and surprising work. For It’s Hot, It’s Not, our Clore theatre will be filled with a tree. The apples which dangle from this tree may work like a light switch, or create a sound when pulled - the relationship between cause and affect playfully demonstrated, extended and subverted. The natural world (trees, blossom, leaves, mud, wind, snow and lightning storms) will find a theatrical form, allowing the audience to experience and relate to the world they know outside of the theatre in new and exciting ways.

Creating a new piece of theatre takes time; the company have undertaken two periods of development for the show before their final devising and rehearsal period in the new year. Mole Wetherell describes some of the elements the company have discovered for the show in these initial devising workshops:

We looked at what we liked, and what our children liked: slapstick; Foley; Laurel & Hardy; making sculptures with found objects; lego, building temporary structures or environments and then knocking them down.

During our second research and development phase, we produced the playtext for It’s Hot, It’s Not. We developed a rough script, structured with four chapters for the four seasons.

We stopped using words onstage, and started communicating visually and phsyically with each other. We developed a set of rules and logic for our imaginary world. We brought in flowers, apples and a tree, planted seeds, swatted imaginary insects, got overrun by a swarm of flies and created a new accumulative physical language of cause and butterfly effect.

We researched weather systems and scientific theories, and played with this newly formed system of producing performance materials and situations. We still had our methods of slapstick, word play, word association and Foley, then we brought in cats and dogs for when it might rain, invented a world where wet weather happened inside and it was dry outside; an upside down place where summer and winter co-exist and an imaginary world grew out of our actions. And thus, It’s Hot, It’s Not was born. Reckless Sleepers

TEACHER RESOURCES

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TEACHER RESOURCES

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MAKING THE PLAY INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR MOLE WETHERELLWHAT MIGHT WE EXPECT FROM THE SHOW? I’d say it will be a lot of fun. It’s got this undercurrent about the weather, and of course we can’t ignore what’s happening to the world and to the weather - but I don’t think that’s what we want to explore. The way we see the show is that it’s a play on words, or a play on images. It’s about the language and objects sometimes not making complete sense together, but of course they always make sense.

One of the focuses is about play, and playing with objects, and reimagining what an object can be. We played this game the other day with a stick where the stick became a cricket bat or a tennis racket; that one object had a completely different set of scenarios around it - an interpretation of an image and a multiplicity of ideas of what it could be.

We then repeated the activity using movement instead of objects, starting with a gesture like a wave that could then become something bigger like fanning yourself because you’re hot, and then the fan becomes a kind of rain dance. So we see someone doing an action but then make it bigger and make it into something else.

So it’s playing around with and reinterpreting physical language, which is the basis of the show so far.

YOUR PREVIOUS SHOWS HAVE BEEN FOR ADULTS; YOU DON’T NORMALLY MAKE WORK FOR CHILDREN, DO YOU? We’ve never made a show specifically for a younger age group. We think that our theatre shows have been quite accessible to children, because they are generally quite visual and allow scope for ideas and imagination rather than narrative-based story or complicated psychologically based characters. It’s more about an energy or a feeling as the emotional route through the work, and often it’s focused around task: the task to build this, or the task to destroy that. So our work is quite open to a wider age range.

HOW MUCH DO YOUR IDEAS COME FROM WATCHING YOUR DAUGHTER? OR IS THIS THE KIND OF PLAYFUL APPROACH YOU TEND TO USE WHEN MAKING THEATRE?A bit of both! I trained as a visual artist, and what has been brilliant about having a child is going back to some of those simple drawing techniques I learnt when I was a student: simple things like squeezing paint onto a piece of paper, folding it over and getting a butterfly. We’ve got a table in the kitchen and underneath it there’s an outline of my daughter Charlie. We take the top off every now

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and again and do another outline. It’s a bit like a tree ring; that’s a really nice little project in itself. She’s testing me as a young person to make new things. I’ll be busy this afternoon making a little table out of some wood for her doll, and making a little chair! She knows I can do these things. I quite like the challenges that she sets me; the other day she asked me is there such a thing as a Darth Vader penguin? There is one on the internet - someone had put some Darth Vader music on film of a penguin. I love the playfulness of ideas that she has and responding to that.

It was Charlie jumping in the puddle and me joining in, and enjoying that process and allowing myself to enjoy it. I enjoy playing with that age group, they’re liberated at that age.

WILL THE SHOW TOUCH ON CLIMATE CHANGE? Initially we talked about making something that connected to our own ideas about the weather. We’re careful not to say we’re making a show about the weather, because like with all of our projects they have no singular “This is about” thematic…The weather is one of the frames that we stretch the project around, and by doing this a project can be much more than about one topic or theme.

We talked about the weather because Reckless Sleepers have consistently brought the weather into our theatre performances.

We like the idea of bringing things that happen outside inside. We once built a real snowman and stood him on stage. We like turning things upside down, inside out and back to front.

We’d watched our children jump into puddles, and wanted to join in, building snow men, blowing the seeds off a dandelion, enjoying what the weather brings, but also at the same time we’re (as artists, adults and parents) concerned with what’s happening outside the studio: freakishly cold spells, droughts, storms, hurricanes, and that the seasons seemed to be muddying - it didn’t seem to drip, drip, drop in April any more…

We wanted to make something that was fun for children to experience, but also prompted questions from the older members of the audience that came along, too. So we imagined building a world, another Reckless Sleepers world that exists inside a theatre, not like the world outside. It is governed by a different set of rules, has its own logic, structure and systems of behaviour. It takes inspiration from the outside world, yes, but this world is a better place, it’s a place where ideas, objects, actions and words are recycled. It’s a place where you can witness the results of cause and effect; it’s an environment that is good for nature; where fish don’t eat plastic; where night follows the day, where spring follows winter.

It’s felt like spring is tending to happen earlier and there are freaky weather conditions. That’s what drew me to making a show about the weather and our confusion with that, and nature’s confusion with that. Daffodils are coming up much earlier than they used to. It’s those things that really struck me as something we needed to tackle and that can be extended to talk about global warming, without talking about global warming. I think what we try to do as a company is open up an idea for imagination to grow – we never go “This show is about this”, in doing that, it kills that possibility of growth of imagination. We call it the playground of the imagination: not just for us, the people making the show, but for the people we are sharing the room with.

I’m interested in doing something that could spark an idea for teachers to talk about what’s happening, how can we save the planet from global warming? It’s about starting that conversation

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early. Not that I want to lose the responsibility of our generation, we’ve got to act. We can help by introducing ideas early on.

So that isn’t the primary purpose for doing the show, but I think we have to be aware of it.

YOU’RE NOT IN REHEARSALS FOR THE SHOW AT THE MOMENT, BUT DO YOU CONTINUE WORKING ON IT? READING AND DOING RESEARCH FOR EXAMPLE? I’m busy with it all the time. We want a tree suspended in the theatre in the show. I was walking in the Ardennes recently and looking at all the trees, and we want an apple tree because it’s a particular

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shape, and I was thinking about activities you can do with children – what you can do with little twigs? We made a really nice weather mobile with bits of twig and string. I’m always busy with it.

We’ll really start working on the play in a focused way in January, when we build the set and work on it and things will change. They always do when you work on the set; it opens up new worlds. It’s hard, isn’t it? Because how do we articulate something that doesn’t exist yet?

CAN YOU DESCRIBE HOW YOU WILL USE SOUND AND FOLEY?The set will be a big tree, or trunk, with apples on strings; some of them will be switches, and if you pull an apple, it might switch a light on. Pull another apple and it might start a rain storm, pull another apple and get sound – it could be a thunder storm. So we want to play with how sounds makes an action, makes a sound, makes an action. It’s accumulative.

There’s a scene with a fly, playing with that idea, me going buzz, as if there’s a fly in the room, but there’s not, it’s me. It’s a little bit panto, illustrating the playfulness. Someone comes in and switches the light on because it’s dark, and I switch it back off, they switch it on, I switch it off, switch it on, switch it off... It’s that repetitive action; if someone jumps in a puddle when they are four years old they don’t want to leave it.

It’s like with my daughter – I switch the light off, she turns it on. I switch the light off...

IS IT LESS ABOUT WEATHER AND MORE ABOUT ABSURDITY?It’s about the joy of discovery, the joy of a joke, the joy of pretending together.

Often what we make is not just the show, but coming into the theatre and leaving is a part of that experience, so we’re always available for chats afterwards. We don’t like to hide, and that is an aesthetic of the way we work; you can see the mechanics of the show. It’s often very funny, even though it might have a dark undertone. We like that idea of making people laugh, but we never look for laughs, it’s a balance.

ARE THERE ANY ACTIVITIES YOU DO IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM THAT MIGHT BE GOOD FOR A TEACHER TO RUN WITH THE CHILDREN IN THEIR NURSERY/CLASS?We played a game the other day with a few of our children aged between four and seven, where a stick could be presented as something else with a mime, or a static image. So it became a telescope, a bat, a snooker cue, a walking stick…

It’s been a long time, but I used to do this process called freestyle silly dancing, playing some music and the group has to dance like they are shopping in a supermarket, or walking on the moon…

I’ve been thinking about the visual art workshops that I’ve done in the past; there are quite a lot of activities that I have done, and still do with Charlie (our daughter). These are very simple things, like wax crayon rubbings of leaves, folding a painting to create butterflies, drawing around a shape or body - different colours to show a movement sequence.

TEACHER RESOURCES

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TEACHER RESOURCES

I’ve also been thinking about growing things from seed. Charlie and I planted some melons earlier this year, we’ve also got a garden full of sunflowers. We’ve been making kites, weather stations, creating things from twigs, like a simple mobile that has images of clouds, rainbows, rain…

I’m also thinking about materials which are easy to source, like soil and mud (my daughter loves making mud stuff), but then making drawings from these things. We also do massive paintings with just water and big brushes on the flagstone patio in our garden, using chalk on the floor, and making stepping stones, which could produce a movement sequence.

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DRAMA ACTIVITIESTEACHER RESOURCES

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES:A series of drama, dance and visual arts activities will be added to this pack and will be available online from December 2018. These activities are designed to capture children’s imaginations and inspire them to explore and experiment for themselves, as well as find ways to give artistic form to their ideas. They offer a range of possible ways to link with your classroom priorities.

Our teacher resources and CPD support teachers in embedding drama and creative activities in their curriculum planning. Working through drama and the arts allows children to explore things that matter to them within an imaginative context, draw on their prior knowledge and apply it to new situations, develop language as they give expression to new understandings, and develop emotional intelligence and critical thinking as they see things from different perspectives. It also allows the children to take responsibility, make decisions, solve problems and explore possibilities.

Starting points for the development of these activities include:

The Seasons and the Weather

These activities will allow teachers to respond to the theme of the seasons and how we experience the weather, drawing on children’s own experience of different kinds of weather and seasons, how they experience the weather, and how they interact with weather and the natural world at different times.

There will be opportunities to introduce discussions around climate change in an age-appropriate way, touching on the relationship between human beings and the natural world, cause and effect, and the concept of energy and preserving energy.

Play and Imagination

Play is central to how children learn about the world they are a part of. The show and these drama and arts activities will build on the way in which children play naturally, but will enable teachers to focus and extend that playing.

We will develop dance, drama and Foley exercises suggested by the company’s own creative experimentation around cause and effect, turning things on their head, upside down worlds, wordplay, and extending and building upon actions.

Visual Arts

These activities will be developed in response to the company’s own use of visual arts exercises in creation of the piece. The work will respond to the natural world and will incorporate the use of found

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TEACHER RESOURCES

objects in nature: twigs, leaves, pinecones, seeds etc. to create mobiles, leaf rubbings, collages and paintings.

Responding to the Show

The pack will offer suggested ways to explore the show after your visit, including retelling and acting out favourite moments from It’s Hot, It’s Not; creating miniature versions of the set, or making animations in response to the performance.

When we think about making a project, as well as who might come and experience the piece, we’re also thinking about when it happens, what happens before and after: what else can we draw from the project to support extra activities?

What we imagined is that children who have experienced the piece might want to do what we do ourselves, even though we’ve taken much of our inspiration from observing how our children play.

We warm them up and they are activated. It might be windy or it’s Chinese New Year, so there are ideas about making kites; it’s going to be spring soon, so we could offer each attendee a sunflower seed to plant. Or a school group a packet of wildflowers or herbs to plant in their own school garden. Mole Wetherell

IT’S HOT, IT’S NOTA Unicorn Production in association with Reckless Sleepers

By Reckless Sleepers Resource pack written by Catherine Greenwood