Northern6 on Tour! - An ethnographic workshop performance at Hull Collegiate School

Yesterday saw Northern6 visit Hull Collegiate School, we took this opportunity to take material from Project Sword and test this in front of an external audience of year 10 students. We also devised a workshop plan aimed at allowing the students to react to the material they had seen performed and explore this in their own way, focusing on how to quickly generate imagery and then develop these initial ideas into more complex work.

For the company this was a valuable and important milestone in the devising process, allowing us to receive responses to the material from other viewers, rather than just our own peers and academic tutors, this meant that we were able to understand more where the work sat within the making process and the wider world as a whole, also what sort of audience we were targeting the work at. The whole experience was brilliant and reignited the drive on the project which, admittedly had dropped slightly over the past couple of weeks, the performance aspect of the package allowed us to discover holes in the work which we did not see simply running the work in the black box back at York St John, as the feeling you get from an audience cannot be replicated in any other way than having one present which in a university setting isn’t always possible, however we also were able to highlight the strengths of the work allowing us to see which ways were the best ways to approach such a sensitive subject area. The workshop element was equally useful but in many different ways, seeing a group of year 10 students not only respond to and value a subject area which they possibly did not know massive amounts about but do so in such a complex and sophisticated way, reminded us why we chose the subject and why we are continuing to strive to do the events justice in our work.

The whole afternoon was a pleasure and Hull Collegiate were very welcoming. The staff and students we met were supportive and responsive to the material and ourselves and gave valuable feedback the we will now take back into the studio.