Insect Theatre

While we get Xpresso ready for Christmas, I’m increasingly involved with the small storytelling team in 'Abenteuerland', the weekly children's club in Kemnat. This helps them because their staff can concentrate elsewhere, and gives me experience with children's theatre, an area were I have almost no training. This team is different to Xpresso in that they are younger (about 14), primarily Abenteuerland staff, and take on the storytelling while at the same time leading small groups or helping elsewhere. Rehearsal times are currently very short, and the scripts are dictated by the current programme. I’m starting to get the team together for an extra rehearsal rather than trying to prepare everything just before the presentation, and it seems to be helping. Some of the team would like to join Xpresso, but I’m hoping that this team will develop separately as part of Abenteuerland on the basis that it's pointless building one big generalised team when two small specialist teams can develop different styles and help each other.

The picture shows yesterday afternoon’s rehearsal of the “Insect theatre”. Because of the short preparation times at the moment, the team have their scripts, so we have to find ways to integrate them in the presentation. There is a lot of variety: we’ve had a detective story, a puppet theatre and this week is a poem, presented as a sort of readers’ theatre, although the team are far too lively just to read, which makes it much more interesting.