Justice and Mischief – Writing Songs and Open Mic

In the second half of Spring term, we continued our theme of Justice and Mischief and recorded three original songs with help from Johnny and Wes.

Our songs were ‘Bad Egg’ which came from the Humpty Dumpty sketch; ‘Incy Wincy’; and ‘Goldilocks and the Bears’.  Wes and Ben set up a recording studio in one of the side rooms and we all participated in the recording of the other groups’ songs if we wished. I enjoyed the experience – especially seeing Jamie (my son) getting involved.

It was also a pleasure to have Ogohi, Fai  and Nadine with us this half term.  Nadine is a board member of ‘Underground Lights’ and a professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, and Fai and Ogohi are studying for master’s degrees. They took photos and did interviews and even got us an article in the BBC news! They put together a lovely display and celebration of our work at the  Warwick Arts Centre to which we were all invited. We are very grateful to the University of Warwick for sponsoring our workshops.

The open mic took place at the beginning of April.  It was well attended.  We had invited a lot of friends, and they seemed to enjoy it.

I thought we used the stage well this time.  The Humpty Dumpty group used the edge of the stage as a castle wall and split the action between the market place in front of the stage and the castle on the stage.  The Goldilocks group used the stage as upstairs and front of stage as downstairs and with the audience playing the role of the forest where the 3 bears went walking at the start of the play and collected flowers, pine cones etc. (which we had given to audience members beforehand). Amman played the title role in the Incy Wincy play, complete with streamers for legs. I was pleased that he kept his line about accessing the world wide web, but thought it was a waste of his wonderful stage presence to flush him out so quickly!

In the Open Mic, Jotie  reprised her shadow play of Heer Ranjha, sadly without the ukulele this time. There were also a couple of poems and lots of songs. Unfortunately, we ran out of time, so some people missed out on the chance to perform. We did manage to fit in a couple of guest acts, on our theme of Justice and Mischief, with John singing ‘The Tale of Jessie James’ and Andrew singing an original song ‘The Others’ about how, when individuals or groups  disagree with one another, each side tends to demonise the other.