One-off workshop: Emotional baggage

People often carry their past experiences like baggage. It shapes them into who they are. Some drag cases of emotional luggage, while others carry relatively little. The past affects people in the present and future in different ways. Carrying that baggage is like going on holiday with a case of old encyclopaedias or bag of cement.

This workshop is an exercise in using human experiences to develop credible characters.

Resources

• Emotional Baggage: Causes, Signs and Ways to Cope: http://bonobology.com/emotional-baggagebonobology.com/emotional-baggage

• Emotional Baggage: 6 signs you have it and how to let it go: http://hackspirit.com/emotional-baggage-signs-you-have-it-and-how-to-let-it-gohackspirit.com/emotional-baggage-signs-you-have-it-and-how-to-let-it-go

Warm-up (1)

Ask students to find a space and move around a square metre as if they are joyful, free, and without cares or worries. Add an imaginary heavy box to carry. Then a full suitcase. Then another. Then bags around their neck. Then a ball and chain round their ankles. How do they move now? Explain to them that they’re carrying memories from their past they can’t shake off.

Warm-up (2)

Ask students to sit alone to think of a character they’d like to play. They must decide (and write down) the character’s age, height, gender, race, beliefs, education, interests, occupation, skills, family, and likes/dislikes in food and entertainment. Decide some of their key hopes and dreams, ambitions and fears. Now think of their past relationship(s) with family or others. What was it like then? How is it now?

Warm-up (3)

Ask them to put the memories they can’t leave behind (bad mixed with some good or less bad) into symbolic luggage. Their minds and memories are weighed down and it affects them emotionally and physically.

Teacher-led discussion

Sometimes actors who have played highly emotional scenes suffer a sense of ‘emotional acting baggage’, but we are about the emotions that people, rather than actors, carry around for decades and which affect them adversely. It may be based on regrets for things done, said, neglected, or times of bad behaviours, betrayal or committing crime. Do the students have any examples?

Marley’s Ghost

In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Jacob Marley is the ghost who haunts former partner Ebenezer Scrooge and is often depicted draped in heavy ball and chains, a visual depiction of all the sins, pain caused to others and emotional baggage from his wasted life. http://bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zcmhcwx

Suitcase images

‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ from the musical Evita is a stirring song with a powerful suitcase image at its centre. If there’s one in the prop cupboard, it would be worth visually demonstrating how the suitcase can be used as a symbol of being encumbered, held back by what it contains.

Group devising (1)

In small groups of your choice, ask the students to discuss how their individual characters may be realistically combined into one piece. Dysfunctional family? Work colleagues? Staffand patients in hospital? Or prison? Or school? There may have to be compromise here and some characters will be natural sidekicks or less loud than others.

Group devising (2)

In groups, with all characters agreed and emotional baggage as heavy as it needs to be to make compelling drama, they should bring up a past memory or two triggered by music, a chance encounter, clothing, film, saying or joke, smell, taste of food, photos, diary or video, a lost job or cause, a broken relationship, or insecurity about looks or body image. This trigger affects all of them.

Directing and shaping

Either you or selected students use directorial authority to decide which form of emotional baggage should be the main theme. Too much baggage and the piece will be over-cluttered and complex.

A play

Emotional Baggage by Lindsay Price is a great source of ideas, with no dialogue, solely action and some well-worked examples of the kind of emotions that work dramatically.http://theatrefolk.com/products/emotional-baggage

Group devising (3)

Circulate among the groups, making sure all students are doing something useful, whether it’s working on lights or props or taking on the role of effective background players. Keep focusing on the key emotional baggage affecting their chosen characters.

Outcomes

There must be an outcome. What effect does the baggage – the opened suitcase of memories – have on at least one character and, in turn, on others? How will it end? Will it never end?

Baggage

Included in emotional baggage may be past relationships, break ups, accidents, death, betrayal, regrets, misunderstandings, leaving too soon, relational or financial jealousy, anger, resentment, in the wrong relationship now or then, being wrongly accused or sacked or just plain guilt.

Sharing

Ask all groups to share part of their pieces, if time permits. Check them against need to show impact of baggage on certain characters.

Reviews

You make some comments or invite peers and self-reviews make constructive suggestions for devising and presenting improvement.