Mike Kenny’s play The Vultures’ Song and workshops are now free in Prospero. This was how both were made.

Filming The Vultures’ Song for Prospero, for use in online interactive resources for schools.

In 2017 Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah approached C&T about the possibility of a collaboration.  The Blahs (as their close friends and relatives call them) are a long-standing and much respected Theatre-in-Education company serving schools and young people in the Leeds and Yorkshire (UK) area.  There were lots of great reasons to collaborate, but our common history and values in drama education and TIE offered a great starting point.

C&T’s Prospero digital platform was an ideal starting point for the collaboration.  Prospero is a powerful, flexible digital toolkit for the building and sharing of interactive drama learning materials.  The vision was to mix filmed scenes from the play alongside interactive resources – both drama and cross-curricular – to enrich students’ and teachers’ follow up to their live school performance, with teachers and children being able to use these resources independently. They could set their own pace for learning, whilst retaining the benefits of active kinaesthetic learning. Prospero is ideal for such needs, balancing step-by-step instructions with video tutorials and personalised learning techniques.

The Blah’s Artistic Director, Deborah Pakkar-Hull, had been a developing a new play by the company’s regular writer/collaborator Mike Kenny. The play, timed to tour almost simultaneously with the 70th anniversary of the partition of India, explored themes of identify, culture, migration and displacement. Happily, these themes chimed with a C&T online drama project exploring migration, Push/Pull (more information about this project will come online soon, check the watchlist on Prospero to receive notifications when it goes live).

In rehearsal in Leeds.

The resulting play, The Vultures’ Song toured to primary schools, theatre and community across Leeds, Yorkshire and beyond.  Whilst the company rehearsed the play on the top of floor of a central Leeds tower block, C&T captured interviews with the cast, exploring their methods, favourite drama exercises and games.  Working with a cohort of teachers who’s schools would be receiving performances of the play, C&T identified three areas for exploration after the production: the history of the partition of India, connections between the events of the play and PSHE, and the play’s production.

At the dress rehearsal, in Mind The Gap’s wonderful studio theatre complex in Leeds, C&T video-captured key scenes of the play.  These scenes were integrated into the Prospero resources, first refreshing children’s memories of the play and then seamlessly leading them into follow-up materials, drama exercises and other activities.

Very little time existed between the dress rehearsal and first schools’ performances, so C&T worked swiftly over the Easter holidays to integrate the video footage and learning materials into Prospero, so the resources were available for schools from the very first show. One of the great benefits of Prospero is its flexibility: you can build a workshop to share in less than an hour, where as to build the equivalent as a stand-alone website could take weeks or months.  It’s simple to use, responsive and highly malleable to different classroom needs.

The first teachers’ performance of Vultures’ Song, in a primary school in Leeds. Director, Deborah Pakkar-Hull, to the right.

The completed resources in Prospero were used by dozens and dozens of schools during the plays extensive national tour.  One of the great benefits of Prospero is that reaching participants at scale and distance are easy.  Everything is just a click away. Unlike a traditional teachers pack Prospero makes practical, creative tasks easy to understand by using video and media to illustrate activities and breaks them down into step-by-step instructions.  

 Now The Blahs and Prospero have made the whole set of the Vultures’ Song resources freely available to all, including a streaming of the play itself. Watch the play, and work through the four interconnected workshops for yourself.