Tutor Rosa Postlethwaite had set up a series of scratch sessions entitled Testing Ground, in the previous module and everyone had agreed they had been really useful. I suggested at the beginning of the 3rd module that perhaps as a cohort we could try and continue with these sessions each week. The response was positive, so I set up a Wednesday afternoon session starting 13th June. The premise was, that I would prepare warm up exercises for the first one in the hope that we would take it in turns to lead. This would be followed by 3 min scratch ideas ,informed by a previously chosen word, from each participant with Q&A to finish. It was slow to start, with folk being very tentative but it did build to a point we were attempting to devise a piece together. The above was an improv scratch I'd come up with around the word Opposites, in reference to people that have a tendency to contradict whatever is being said.I handed out these bits of text to the other participants and responded in a contradictory way to whatever their answer was. It was a start! We had about 4 sessions in the end, the impending Live Theatre Scratch Show deadline loomed large,
the panic set in and we were't confident enough as a group at the time to devise anything solid. Although I'm glad to say that some of the cohort did go on to perform together.