Paper Birds: The Art of Devising Drama

Year 10 Drama students were excited to participate in a creative two-hour workshop led by El Solly from The Paper Birds Theatre Company on Wednesday 14th May. The workshop supports their GCSE Drama course which features a ‘Devising Theatre’ component. The group looked at ‘Verbatim’ drama, meaning ‘word for word’. Using a social media stimulus they collected verbatim responses from one another in the research phase, considered how the responses could be staged in a naturalistic way, a heightened way and a more character based way, and finished by performing their devised scripts.

The Paper Birds are a renowned UK-based theatre company, celebrated for their innovative, issue-based performances that combine verbatim theatre with visual storytelling. Their work explores pressing social and political themes with sensitivity and creativity, and they are widely regarded as leading practitioners in contemporary devised theatre. Engaging with their methodology provided our students with a valuable, real-world insight into the process of professional theatre-making.

On their website, Paper Birds state their aim to use thought provoking theatre and engagement as a catalyst to spark conversation and change and to creatively empower people to think, talk about and act on the things that are important to them. El Solly added “What do we want people to feel about this? You can just turn on the TV and see people saying things. What can we do when we make theatre? We can make the audience sympathise with a person or get angry by something they are saying. You can use character to move the audience to those different things. At the heart, verbatim is just exactly the words that we are using that have been collected from real life people. That’s really interesting to an audience and that’s a whole range of voices represented in a piece of theatre which is nice to see.”

Jess (Year 10) enthused, “I thought it was intriguing to find out how they do their devising work and how we should do it. It’s a collaborative type of thing; we make up our own script and then perform it together. It’s a creative subject which eases off the pressure a bit from all academic things.”

Aji (Year 10) agreed saying, “This morning has been really great, I’ve loved having the opportunity of working with Paper Birds to create a piece; a piece based on what other people said. One that we create movement, one that we create more dialogue with I really enjoyed it. When we open our minds to devising we can create so much stuff.”

The Wren, one of our partnership schools, enjoyed El’s workshop in the afternoon. Daisy, one of The Wren’s Drama students, commented “It was spectacular. I loved working as a group. It made the experience fun and inspiring as we built ideas together and brought them to life on stage.”

Director of Drama, Jessica Wittert van Hoogland, concluded: “The workshop has provided a hands-on opportunity to develop rehearsal techniques, build collaborative skills, and explore strategies for creating original theatre – all of which are central to their assessment and progression in the subject.”

STEAM is a real strength of Leighton Park, combining the logical thinking from STEM with the creativity of the Arts to ensure our students develop problem-solving skills, teamwork and a flexible approach to their work, all positive attributes that will be valuable in shaping their future success.