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strange
meeting
Tor
Theatre present a performance workshop
on
First World War poetry for GCSE and AS level
students.
Strange
meeting takes 1914 - 18 poems found on both the OCR and the AQA
English
Literature syllabuses
and brings
them
alive with
impassioned
performances.
Once
the students’ emotions have
been engaged by these performances, a greater understanding of the poetry
is pursued through discussing not only the poems themselves but also the
social and historical circumstances that they were written in.
Works
by Anna Gordon Keown, John McCrae, Wilfred Owen, Margaret Postgate Cole,
Siegfried Sassoon and Katherine
Tynan
are all included.
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Performance
& Workshop
Strange
meeting has been devised and is performed by David Reakes, a professional
actor with 16 years experience of working in schools.
The poetry is
performed simply and directly, allowing the power of the writing to shine
through. The empathy that these performances engender then becomes the
starting point for a deeper understanding of each piece.
The poems are discussed with the
students in ways that touch on such literary qualities as imagery,
narrative voice and metre. Historical and social
contexts are also brought in, as are comparisons with works from other
eras and conflicts.
During the workshop, critical and
analytical techniques are learned that can easily applied to any other
works that are being studied.
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LEARNING
POINTS:
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The
poems are introduced as the blogs of their day – short bursts of
fact and feeling that very effectively draw the reader into the
experiences and thoughts of the poet.
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The
following questions are asked of each poem after they have been
performed: What is being described in this poem? What does the poet
think about this? What linguistic ‘tricks’ does the poet use to
make us feel the same way?
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The
poems are broken down into key phrases and words, all chosen by
students as they hear them performed.
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Pieces
are compared and contrasted with each other. They are also contrasted
with poems inspired by previous conflicts (The Charge Of The Light
Brigade and The Iliad), showing how perceptions of war changed as did
the wars themselves.
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