Diving back into live theatre!

Written By Vicky

We want to share with you what Moonbeam Theatre have been up to recently!

We have been working super hard on our Scuba-Dee Scuba-Daa R&D project with our partners, St Nicholas SEN School, Canterbury. The project included exciting weekly sensory workshops which gave our participants space to engage with a variety of sensory materials and activities in the ways they liked best! By observing and interacting with them we grew to understand the unique sensory preferences of each child, which has informed our practice for the project. We packed a lot in during this 7 week project and learnt a huge amount!

As an emerging company, this has been our first opportunity to gain one to one experience with our audience, which has proved to be unbelievably rewarding. After the success of our summer virtual project, Between the Trees, we were ready to develop our practice and learn more about making LIVE inclusive theatre for children with complex needs.

Throughout the project, ‘simplicity’ has been one of our biggest takeaways. Some of our most successful sessions focussed on simple sensory props that proved to be incredibly effective, for example, paper fans! Our participants loved using these to experience a cool breeze as we explored the wind over the ocean! We trialed many other sensory and participatory ideas during our workshops too; there was plenty of singing, tactile sea creatures and lots of bubbles!

The project has also given us the opportunity to develop our facilitation skills. We spent time evaluating each session and building on feedback from teachers and one another. Our most useful feedback was through the 'unspoken,' which we received from our participants through their interactions with us and the materials. This approach has built our confidence for future work and has provided us each with a ‘toolkit’ of ideas when something just isn’t working out as planned! It is through this hands on experience with our participants that we learn how to effectively respond to different scenarios and ensure each child has the best time!

Our discoveries from the sessions are being used to devise the second phase of our project, Scuba-Dee Scuba-Daa School Tour! We will be touring to Kent SEN schools at the beginning of 2022 and we cannot wait to bring our theatre into schools! If you would like to book onto the tour, please contact moonbeamtheatre@gmail.com while slots are still available!

Photo description: Elyse stands in amazement as colourful scarfs fall around her.