Review: Structuring Devised Performance, The Paper Birds

The Paper Birds are a UK-based theatre company, founded in 2003. They are known for their verbatim pieces and devised work, including In a Thousand Pieces, Thirsty and Others.

This CPD pack focuses on structuring devising theatre. It comes with a link to a video in which creators Kylie, Jenna and Georgia explain all the different elements. They then provide exercises that can be used to help encourage research into areas such as verbatim, history, politics, public culture and facts and statistics. The depth in the methodology makes it extremely relevant to approaches with both GCSE and A-level devised work. Within the video there are examples of a company putting the exercises into practice. While you wouldn't necessarily want to show the whole video to the students, as it is very much aimed at teachers as a CPD session, it would definitely be beneficial to share clips of the work.