How to be funny (ha ha - not odd!)

OK. I'd love to do a farce with my adult group. So, here's what I've gleaned so far from my research into How To Be Funny:

• the comedy comes from the characters/situations (not from jokes in themselves)
• and is based on real life situations we can relate to (as an audience)

Apparently, we laugh at:

• the unexpected
• embarrassing stuff (but only if it's some else)
• insults (ditto)
• repetition (of actions or catch phrases, running gags in other words)

And obviously timing is everything. The pace of the play needs to be fast and furious (never let up, let the comic tension build). And the same is true of the comic situations and running gags we develop - these are far more effective when we build them up in stages.
Also, if we're writing for amateurs, we can write for our actors and focus on emotions that are easy to relate to and portray (like anger, frustration...).

I've been revisiting "Fawlty Towers" recently in search of inspiration. The comedy is very carefully built up to maximise dramatic (comic) tension: one dead body would be bad enough but Basil finds himself with two inert bodies on his hands when he slaps an hysterical guest and knocks her out. And Manuel's infamous catch phrase "I know nooooothing" is a fine example of a running gag that is built up and up until it's climax: Basil spends an entire, frustrating episode teaching Manuel to say nothing about the-money-he-won-on-a-horse, only to have him finally understand ...just when Basil needs him to speak out.

The universe, black light... and hula hoops

This years' play was set in space. Like last year, we decided to play around with black light to see if we could give some of the scenes a more "galactic" feel. Last year, we experimented a lot with using white under black light (the play was about ghosts , after all!) and this year's the theme - the universe, the stars and planets, astronauts - seemed to lend itself equally well to black light.... but it was all just as white! We were desperate to get our hands on a bit of colour, and see how that worked under the lights. So, we found a funky way to sneak a bit in (and pay homage to the iconic TV series, Star Trek, in the process):


For the psychedelic saturns, we covered hula hoops in pieces of material cut from reflective waistcoats (which react really well under black light) and we stuck circles on the kids' tummies in a contrasting colour as the planet.


When working with black light, the focus is usually on perfecting the illusion. It's all about hiding the mechanisms because the magic is usually in not knowing how the visual effects we are seeing were achieved. However, we felt this scene was actually enriched by the (inevitable) "imperfections". When a child drops their hula hoop - lets us in on the secret as it were - the magic is strangely heightened for the viewer (in my opinion). Which is why we decided not to hide the kids as they come off stage and to turn the lights up just a fraction "too soon" in order to break the spell a little... Does it work? What do you think? 

Watch the whole show here.

Putting on a play: a glimpse backstage....

Like any play, what goes on on stage is only half the story. Behind the scenes is usually a frenzy of hidden activity and this summer's play was no exception. Our productions focus on colour, music and movement (as opposed to dialogue) and generally involve a large cast of kids, so they inevitably end up relying heavily on props.


The props for a cast of 22 kids take up a LOT of space - think 20 space pistols, 20 light sabres, 8 UFOs, a heap of galactic guns, 12 love hearts, 24 shiny pom poms, 22 shower caps and alien glasses and you'll get an idea (we were basically only missing the partridge in a pear tree and the kitchen sink). Add into the mix the 22 kids themselves, a space rocket, 2 astronauts, 5 hula hoops, puppets for the black light scene, and 6 backstage helpers and life gets decidedly overcrowded.

Needless to say we have learnt over the years the importance of a well-run backstage area!

 So, a few pointers for anyone finding themselves in danger of being drowned in backstage prop chaos!

1. Get a good backstage team together
I can't stress this enough. You need enough helpers backstage (but not so many it adds to the confusion -  I suggest starting with 2 and gradually training people up). Get them involved as early as possible in the process, even if it seems pointless at the beginning - it gives you time to gel and become that "well-oiled machine" and it gives your helpers time to get familiar with the play. Have regular meetings; make sure they feel involved.

2. Be organised!
Encourage the backstage team to work out a system for organising the props and get it going as early as possible in the process.
Team members should be given specific tasks to be in charge of. This helps the kids enormously as they know who is doing what and will also help you spot when extra helpers are needed.
Cheat sheets with cues and props/scene changes summarised and stuck to the wall are a great help - and mean that if someone has to step in at the last minute for some reason, they will know more or less what they should be doing.

3. Get working props together as soon as possible
It is very important to start working with props as early as possible in the process, especially if you are working with children. They can be stand-in props if you want to save the real thing for the performance (this is sometimes a very good idea, especially when you are working with kids, as props take a lot of wear and tear) but should be as close as possible in weight and dimensions to give a clear idea of how it will work in the performance. It will also help the backstage team work out a strategy for dealing with the props. They need to work out who will receive and who will hand out which props? Where they will be stored? Whether there are any difficult changeovers that need special attention etc...

4. Practise the backstage routine as part of the rehearsal process
Get helpers used to taking rehearsals seriously (it can be tempting to "coast" through the early rehearsals ) and practise any tricky moments/changeovers that are causing trouble as they happen. If necessary, stop the rehearsal and talk the team through who is doing what.

5. Cultivate a responsible attitude in the children when they are backstage
This takes a concerted effort by the group leader and needs to be backed up by the backstage team.  
- insist on silence backstage: this can be hard for kids to understand especially if they are young or they have never been in a play before; even "experienced" young actors can find long stretches behind the scenes tedious.

 

Some tricks for encouraging silence:

• encourage a little healthy competition to see which student or group is quietest during any given scene. We tend to have half the cast at each side of the stage during our productions, so we encourage them to try and beat the opposite team. We plot "progress" on a magnetic board and whichever team wins the most points temporarily wins the Silence Trophy... until the other team wins it back etc. (In reality, they spend weeks fighting over a spray painted yogurt pot!)
• if the problem persists, make a CD of a quiet part of the sound track of the play and add background noise of children talking, then play the CD at the start of a rehearsal (as if you have recorded them) to show them what it sounds like to the audience when they all talk backstage
• as a back-up plan on The Night, have a packet of chewy sweets on hand to keep their jaws occupied... but watch out if they have dialogue looming!

- encourage a responsible attitude to props
Kids have boundless enthusiasm, energy and curiosity, a combination that lends itself well to doing theatre... but which can wreak havoc on your props if left unchecked. Adopt a zero-tolerance to silliness when the kids are handling props. "Talk up" the arrival of any new prop as a big event and treat props as a reward they have earned through good behaviour. By the same token remove props immediately from anyone who messes around with them and explain how they can "win" them back again. We often use a particularly attractive prop (this year it was the light sabre, for example) as the "carrot" for treating all the props well (anyone who breaks their glasses on purpose will have a bendy balloon instead of a light sabre"). This technique is also very useful for teaching responsible handling of potentially dangerous props (again, like the light sabres). We reminded the children every time we got them out that anyone misusing their prop would not be allowed to use it.

- wherever possible delegate small tasks and responsibilities to the more able kids
Kids have great memories and often know exactly what should be happening next in a play. If any of your group seem to be consistently good at anticipating upcoming moments in the play, then don't be afraid entrust tasks to them (but use your discretion!). This can work very well for moments that happen on stage (and so are out-of-your-reach), helping little ones find their places, for example, or pushing a certain prop on or off.

Prop-making IV: lava!

For the play we were preparing in this summer's workshop, we needed to represent a lava-filled planet as part of a journey through space. We wanted to find something the children could hold and move in time to Holst's "Mars the bringer of war" but we had to take into account the limited stage space we had available (with 22 kids taking part in the workshop). We looked at many different possibilities: giant flags, pool noodles, fans... and decided to use strips of lining material in different shades of red, orange and yellow.

We used a big black bin as a recipient for the "lava". Having drilled holes in the side,  we threaded strips of silky, shiny cloth through the holes:

The older kids took turns to slowly pull out the lava strips:

The smaller kids stood round the edges with lava flags, swirled in time to the music:

The lava strips were flapped up and down in time to the music. The children also moved round in a circle.

The scene really needed the outer circle of kids moving round the inner "volcano". The music (and the setting - a swirling, volatile lava planet) seemed to cry out for more movement, but the scene worked (if not completely perfectly) and, if nothing else, there was a lot of visual impact in having 22 kids of all ages on stage at once.

See the whole play here.

Prop-making III: light sabres!

No play about aliens and space travel would be complete without a light sabre or two. And if you are doing a play with 22 kids, you are obviously not going to get away with just a couple of them, either! So, this year we had to come up with 20 light sabers. And naturally, since we had access to black lights, they were going to have to glow in the dark!

First thing to remember about black light: normal white paper reacts incredibly well! So, all we had to do was to wrap our light sabers in white paper and keep the lights on during the battle scene.

We wrapped lengths of irrigation tubing in foam (for safety!), leaving a handle length at the end. Then we glued on strips of white paper (papier maché style) with runny white glue.And voilà!


Rehearsing with the light sabres:

To make the light sabres glow, we had the black lights on throughout the whole performance. The paper reacted even with the other lights on, giving the sabres a very "realistic" glow.

We turned the lighting on and off during the alien battle scene (like a very slow strobe effect) and the children assumed different fight poses every time the lights went off. In these moments, all you could see were the sabres glowing spookily:

See the whole play here.

Making props: getting everyone involved!

This blog is essentially about the theatre workshops we run for kids in the Alpujarra mountains in southern Spain. The workshops themselves are all about helping the kids work as a team and encouraging them to see things through to the (bitter!) end; to see theatre as something they can relate to (and take part in) and to get them thinking visually and relating to music emotionally...

However, slowly over the years, a growing number of adults have been getting involved in the plays we put on. Many of them are parents of the kids taking part and others enjoy the plays we put on and just want to get involved. As far as I'm concerned, this is great news! It has made the whole project much more of a community thing - and it has opened people's eyes a bit to just how much work is involved behind the scenes (which is never a bad thing!).

So, prop making has become quite a social affair. We get together at the weekends during the six weeks of the workshop and mass produce props with impressive gusto. If you are planning a prop-making session with a group of volunteers, it's worth bearing a few things in mind:

• not everyone considers themselves "artistic" (and can sometimes feel intimidated by the idea of getting "creative") so:

• give clear instructions and think through strategies beforehand (stencils, pictures as examples etc.)
• save the basic jobs (painting base coats, cutting, sticking) for these people
• find creative ways of getting people involved (for example, someone may feel happier kicking a ball round with the kids outside, which is a great way of helping out but doesn't involve paint)

• make an extensive list of props needed several days before the first workshop (this is your chance to make some serious progress with the props, so get the most out of your help!)
• make sure you have enough scissors, paint brushes, hammers, glue... etc. for lots of volunteers to get involved
• divide up the list into jobs and if you know who is coming, think about who can do which job
• make sure you have all the necessary basic materials
• it will help your "morale" considerably to feel you are making progress with the props, so use your prop sessions (and helpers!) to tackle the bigger (or more time consuming) projects (and save easy snipping jobs for in front of the telly!)
• if your volunteers are bringing kids with them (as is often the case) think through some entertainment options - having pens and paper on hand will cut down on the number of extra volunteers pestering you to help (unless you are planning on getting the kids involved); a ball or hula hoops if there is an outside space; is there someone who would volunteer to help keep them occupied? -  and perhaps have a few teatime snacks to hand for later.

Children's theatre workshop Summer 2012

The summer is here, the days are getting hotter... and we are embarking on our 4th children's theatre workshop. We are based in a small village in the Alpujarra mountains in Spain (which are basically the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Granada). To set the scene......

The workshops are supported by a group of (uncomplaining!) parents who throw themselves into prop making and costume design, helping out backstage and lending a hand in rehearsals every year... and somehow come back for more! The classes are led by me (Anna, el dragón) and my friend, Jana. We have managed to convince our husbands (Pablo and Jose Carlos) to try their hands at acting... and they always end up with some kind of key (usually comic!) role in the play.

We have around 20 kids on the group, aged between about 3 and 12 years old (though no doubt the age limit will increase as the kids get older). We give the workshop in Spanish, though about half of the participants come from foreign (usually English-speaking) backgrounds.

The summer holidays in Spain are loooooong (around 11 weeks) and the workshop is a great way of structuring some of that time and it gives the kids somethinginteresting (and a bit cultural) to do. We rehearse from Monday to Thursday, for an hour a day. Friday is kept free for prop-making, shopping for materials and extra rehearsals, should thety be needed (ha ha!). Our goal is to prepare a play to show the rest of the village in the middle of August. So we have 6 weeks of hard work, sweat... and fun ahead of us!


Check out the photos and videos of previous workshops! And watch this spot for news of how we get on this year....

Starting from Scratch VIII: choosing the music

The stage productions we develop on our workshops centre on music. It provides the dramatic backdrop to the action and helps establish the 'mood' - and indeed to some extent - the message of each scene. So making the right choice of music is a very important (and time consuming!) part of the process when it comes to developing our own material.

Any music we use, needs to:

• be a suitable length (is it long enough? can I shorten it easily?)
• have a structure kids will be able to easily recognise (obviously all music has structure, but is it structured in a way kids will be able to follow up on stage?)
• convey the essence, the mood, the atmosphere... of the scene

To kick off the selection process, I tend to look first at obvious choices like sound tracks to films of a similar theme (in the case of "The Ugle Bug Ball", I might first listen to the sound track to "A Bug's Life or "Bee Movie") or well-known, similarly themed classical music ("The Fight of the Bumblebee" by Rimsky-Korsakov is an obvious choice, for example).

Cover of Bee Movie (Full Screen Edition)

After a bit of googling, I can start to expand the list. For the "Ugly bug ball" I find a surprising number of possible sources of inspiration:

• 'Insect Symphony' by contemporary Finnish composer Kalevi Aho (this includes pieces for butterflies, dung beetles, grasshoppers, ants and dayflies so would be a good place to start)
• "The Spider's Feast" by Roussel 
• Overture to the Wasps by Vaughan Williams
• Scriabin's Tenth Sonata, also known as the "Insect" sonata due to its trills. 
• Bartok's "The Night's Music" from his piano suite "Out of Doors" mimics different creatures at night...birds, frogs, insects.....
• Mussorgsky's "Song of the Flea"
• Grieg's "Papillon"
• Schumann’s Les Papillons
• Schubert’s Der Einsame (The Lonely) about the melancholy of a cricket, sitting on a hearth, mourning the disappearance of the summer
• "The Ant and the Grasshopper" by Leon Rosselson
•  Josquin des Prez's "El grillo e buon cantore"  is a musical painting of a grasshopper

A search for more modern themes comes up with a long list of gems  like:

• Chet Atkins "Centipede Boogie"
• "Spiders" by System of a Down
• "Bug Eyes" by Dredg

  

  Image via Wikipedia

• "Butterflies and Hurricanes" by Muse
• Nina Simone's "Funkier than a Mosquitoes Tweeter"
  
• "Insects" by 10 Years
• "Butterfly Caught2 by Massive Attack
• "Ant Music" by Adam & the Ants
• "Hey there little insect!" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers 
• "Black Butterfly" by Sounds Of Blackness

Not all these songs will be suitable (and many will not really even be about insects!) but the advantage of throwing the net as wide as possible is you might just find something perfect, something really inspiring. It takes a lot of listening on Youtube and Spotify (and a lot of crossing off the list) before you can really start to narrow it down. but the effort is worth it in the end because of what the right piece of music can bring to your play.

Image via Wikipedia

I like to also think about juxtaposition when I'm choosing music for a play. I like it to 'sit well' with what comes before and after it and to provide contrast. I also like using vintage (or simply, older!) songs and music, as they can sometimes be used in a way that is witty. A song like Adam Ant's "Ant Music" for example might be a witty choice for a scene about..... well, the ants, precisely because it is such a, well, obvious choice... and because it will make the adults in the audience chuckle. Vintage choices provide great beats and sometimes a more theatrical musical style. Songs that spring to mind that could be used in this way for this play are Chet Atkins "Centipede Boogie", "I Got Ants In My Pants" by James Brown,"La Cucaracha" by Los Lobos or "Mean Old Bedbug Blues" by Bessie Smith. Depending on how the play itself pans itself, on the direction it takes, there is sometimes room for something a little experimental if it might resonate with audience. An example of something that could be used with our theme would be Tom Waits' spoken 'song' "Army Ants". The moment would need to be there but it could work.

Starting from Scratch VII: Exploring Bugs...

In recent weeks, I've been looking at how you might adapt the children's song "The Ugly Bug Ball" into a stage production for kids. This week, I've been thinking about the type of activities that could be used to explore the "bug" theme in a theatre workshop.

So, a few ideas to get started (feel free to chip in with more!):

• Eric Carle's 'The Hungry Caterpillar'

Base a lesson on the story of The Hungry Caterpillar. When I did this, I cut the fingers off cheap gloves so everyone had a caterpillar to wiggle and handed out food and flashcards to be waved at the right moment. Get kids to do different actions (stand up, sit down, wave one arm etc) when they hear certain words.
As a follow on, get kids to act out a short sketch based on the cycle of life of a butterfly or do this as a puppet show, with quick cutout drawings as puppets or socks and coffee filter butterflies (see below)

• To make coffee filter butterflies: 

1. Cut a coffee filter along the 2 sloping edges and open up to make wings
2. Clip a clothes peg along the centre as a body 
3. Decorate the wings with felt tip pens
4. Use a plant spray bottle to spray lightly with water. leave to dry before clipping onto curtains, lamp cables etc.

• Make an egg box caterpillar by cutting an egg carton in half along the length to leave a string of 3 egg cups still joined together (the caterpillar's body). Decorate and add pipe cleaner antenas.

•  Make pebble 'bug' pets by painting stones (or combinations of stones) and sticking on googly eyes, pipe cleaner antenas etc

• Explore Traditional Songs: 

• There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly: Get them to act out the song - draw a circle on the floor (or make one out of chairs or rope) as the old woman's stomach and get the kids to squeeze in (and wriggle and jiggle) at the right time

•  Nobody Likes Me Everybody Hates Me (Going Down The Garden To Eat Worms): have fun with this traditional playground song (could be combined with the Icky Textures activity below!)
  

• The Ants Go Marching

• Play Musical Bug Statues: a twist on the traditional party game - get the kids moving like a spider... an ant... a butterfly.... in time to music. When the music stops, they freeze and you choose a new insect. (This would be good preparation for the "Ugly Bug Ball" as kids could experiment with dancing like a given insect and explore how different ones would move (a worm would wiggle, for example, and a grasshopper might dance a jig?!)
  

• Play a variation of Hunt The Thimble with plastic bugs hidden around the room. Kids 'become' any bugs that are found for a couple of minutes and then the hunt resumes. This can be combined with the tradional game "Warmer/Colder" - one student goes out and the rest decide where to hide a particular bug. They "guide" the first student to the hiding place by calling out 'warmer' and 'colder' when they are closer or further away. This works well with foreign language students as you can substitute the name of the particular bug being hidden and shout or whisper to guide the searcher (lots of vocab practice).
  

• Play 'Be A Bug': In small groups, get the kids to work together to represent different insects: use their arms and legs to be a centipede, lie head to foot to be a worm, use a bit of imagination (!) to make a grasshopper, a spider, a beetle...
  

• Experiment with music: find a selection of different styles of music (some faster, some slower) andplay them one by one to the students. Get them to listen with their eyes closed and then discuss which music might 'fit' which insects. Opinions may vary but the important thing is to get them thinking...
  

• Talk about phobias: find out who likes bugs... and who doesn't! Why do insects produce this reaction? Show flashcards of different animals (kittens, horses, lions as well as different insects) and discuss the differing reactions.
• Take this further by playing a Halloween favourite, "Icky Textures": prepare several tupperwares filled with a variety of textures (spaghetti, grapes, honey, sand paper.....) and cover them with a cloth so the kids don't know what they are. One by one, get kids to put their hands in the different tubs and describe what they feel. As an extension (as a way of exploring the role of our expections when it comes to the things we are afraid of) send some students out of the room while you do the first activity. Then get them in, one by one, and tell them what they are going to feel (eyeballs, slugs, worms etc). Get help from the rest of the students to build the tension! Later discuss the difference in reaction between the two groups of students.

• Talk about life from an insect's perspective....

• Go outside and spot bugs, watch ants 'at work', hunt for butterflies, find a spider in a web. This can be extended into a bug treasure hunt by giving the kids a list of bugs they must try and find.

For more ideas, check out:
Bug-related Activities  
Ideas for story books about insects and songs that can be sung to traditional tunes
Great ideas for exploiting the Aesop's fable, 'The Ant and The Grasshopper'

Starting from Scratch VI. The Set

For me, when I think about how you would go about creating a stage set for a production of “The Ugly Bug Ball”, the most important factor would have to be the scale. The play is set in the insect world, so we’re obviously looking at roots, foliage, undergrowth, flowers... and we obviously need to go big.

In fact, I think you could have a lot of fun with the stage design. So some ideas:

•  Painted backdrops (perhaps thin gauze, strung on taut wire, to make it easy to change scenes) showing large roots or foliage. Use colour/different images to reflect the mood of a given scene: brown (sad) roots at the beginning and an explosion of colourful flowers for the ball scene perhaps. Ideas for the kind of mural that could be used:

•   Use the kids themselves to: 

• Wear large flowers, garlands of leaves, twigs and branches round their neck
• Hold up silhouettes of rocks, bushes, branches etc to create instant, temporary atmosphere
• Wave real branches & foliage

• Create a sense of perspective by making rocks and bushes to ‘layer’ in front of the backdrop. Make out of card (propped up or held), papier mache (over chicken wire) or polystyrene. Use hinged cut outs at the front of the stage to pull up and down at will like a pop up card:
• Hang real (or plastic) foliage at the front of the stage to frame the scene and add detail or use throughout

• Cut out leaf and petal shapes from cheap household sponges and dip into paint to create quick but effective background foliage

• Alternatively, experiment with projections of foliage and flowers to create a mood instantly

Image from Akimbo

Starting from Scratch V. The Costumes: capes and masks

Image via Wikipedia

Here are some other ideas for costumes for a stage play about insects (in this case for an adaptation of the children's song "Ugly Bug Ball")... I would suggest basic costumes - leggings and a long-sleeved top in black, brown or green (depending on the bug) - with all creative energy poured into a couple of dramatic, colourful additional elements (like wings, antennas, extra legs or whatever feature is characteristc of any given bug ). These elements could be worn as hats (as discussed in my last post) or as masks, tunics or masks. Old tights can be stuffed and sewn to the back of the basic costume as extra (spider, grasshopper or centipede legs). Use wire to make flamboyant antennas. Use simple bin bag (or cloth) tunics with spots, stripes and patterns glued on. The possibilities are endless!

Some inspiration for moth/butterfly capes (which could be easily adapted to ladybirds, dragonflies, bees and wasps):

This theme is also perfect for masks. And masks are a simple solution:

Image via Wikipedia

• for limited budgets, 
• plays where actors need to double up and make quick costume changes 
• if you're into minimalism.

Starting from Scratch IV. The Costumes: hats

In recent weeks, I have been looking at the children's song "The Ugly Bug Ball" and showing how it might be turned into a children's play. One thing has become very clear as time has gone on - the variety of characters (bugs of all shapes and sizes) and the glamour of the setting (a ball!) means colour and flamboyance are paramount.  This is going to be particularly pertinent when thinking about the costumes.

When I think about the idea of insect costumes, immediately I think: hats, masks, capes. All three of these elements are relatively simple to make and easy for kids to wear. Let's look at hats first.

In order to come up with ideas, I first find an image of what I want to create. For example, the earthworm:

Then, I scour the internet, magazines, books, photos.... looking for ideas. These are some I came up with when i was thinking about making a worm hat:

The idea can come from anywhere (a straw basket?!) but you start to slowly get an idea. In this case, I'm leaning towards a tall, coiled hat (think Madge Simpson's hair, perhaps?). The black and red of the original photo would make a very striking worm hat or we could use earthy colours and weave in a few reds and greens.

Here are some ideas for hats for other creepy crawlies from the song which I got largely from looking at Ascot hats (what better place to look for flamboyance?). No offense to the original wearers!

Materials for making hats: netting, foam backed material, papier maché, felt, tubing, bubble wrap, bin bags... You don't always need a whole hat. Sometimes a headband will do and you can always think about adding elements to existing woolly, sun or base ball hats.

Some costume-making resources:

http://www.papiermache.co.uk/
http://www.alleycatscratch.com
http://sewing.about.com/od/halloween/a/costumetricks.htm
http://www.parenthacks.com/2006/10/nosew_modular_h.html
http://artswork.asu.edu/arts/students/tb/06_05_costumes.htm
http://blog.jugglingfrogs.com/2007/10/costumes.html

Starting from scratch III. From lyrics to plot

A song can be an excellent place to start when you're looking to write a theatre script for kids. Songs that tell stories (eg. ballads, traditional children's songs) are particularly good, as most of the work - at least in terms of the plot - has been done for you (!) and the structure of most songs - separated neatly into verses as they are - lends itself to breaking up the plot into scenes. We're in the process of looking at how we might turn "The Ugly Bug Ball" into a theatre production for kids, and  - using the song to give a rough, overall 'shape' to our script - is precisely what we need to do next.

The first step is to analyse our material, so we get the lyrics and we see what we've got. We need to focus on:

• its potential for characters (is it suitable for our group?)
• any clues or ideas we can glean  from the language to help us with mood/atmosphere/dramatisation
• the bare bones of the narrative (does the song give us the whole plot or is it just a starting point?) 

So what do the lyrics of "The Ugly Bug Ball" tell us?

Image via Wikipedia In terms of characters, it's clear that there's huge scope for any number of creepy crawlies of all shapes and sizes, over and above the named "characters" in the song (caterpillar, beetle, dragon fly, fleas, worms etc). This, for me, is a major point in its favour. The sheer range of characters makes it ideal for larger groups (but flexible for smaller ones) and means character choice can be easily tailored to children's taste (not everyone finds spiders appealing, after all). I love the possibilities for costumes that this gives rise to. It's immediately obvious that there's scope for vibrant, colourful and varied costumes. The sky is really the limit (sign of a good song choice!).

From the lyrics, we also get clues that can help us set the tone of the overall play - providing us with a kind of verbal moodboard, if you like. In this case, we have words like "glorious", "happy", "glad" (so we've already got a great feel-good vibe going). Also, phrases like "crickets clicked their tricky melodies" or "the ants were fancy-dancing with the fleas" can give us useful staging ideas. We might have a trio of crickets with castañetas perhaps? Or is this the perfect opportunity for any budding tap dancers in the group?? We may have the ants and the fleas dance in some kind if unusual way: a jig perhaps? Or a spontaneous street dance (depending on the talents and tastes of our group).


In terms of plot, we certainly get the 'bare bones' of a narrative: a lonely caterpillar gets taken to a ball by his sympathetic friends where he meets the love of his life and lives happily ever after. It would be perfectly possible to develop a script entirely around this narrative, but, in my opinion at least, I think it will make a more interesting play with a bit of tweaking. As such, for me it's a song that falls into the second category - it makes a great starting point for a script but doesn't provide us with an off-the-peg plot. (An example of a song in this category would be "Puff The Magic Dragon" where it is possible to base a scene on every verse and you've got a play).
Image by david anderson : da-photography via Flickr
In terms of how we would develop the storyline, off the top of my head, I would say it lends itself to an ugly duckling scenario (especially as caterpillars - as future butterflies - undergo a similar transformation as a baby swan). Perhaps we will have the caterpillar suffer a series of rejections as he tries to befriend various 'glamourous' bugs before getting invited to the ball? Or maybe we can dramatise his loneliness at the beginning in some way. A choreography or scene that shows his lonely lifestyle perhaps? Once we get to part about the ball, our story can slot neatly into the song's narrative (dancing, boy meets girl, happily ever after) but we can draw this out, enjoy the details, as it were: a lively dance scene is surely a must? And we might want some kind of presentation scene (perhaps the insects arriving at the ball?) to showcase all our gorgeous costumes? There is also scope for a feel good finale once we get safely to the happy ending.

There are obviously any number of other ways that the plot of this song could be developed into a storyline for a theatre production - I've just touched on one possibility - but for the time being at least, we know that if we use "The Ugly Bug Ball" as as starting point for a play, we're going to have plenty to get our theatrical teeth into!