Personal Volleyball Skills: I want to focus on slowing down my sets so that I feel less rushed and the accuracy of my sets will improve. I especially want to work on putting more strength into my sets and pushing my sets to power further outside the court.
Personal Skills: This season, I want to feel more confident and have a stronger and more positive presence on the court to encourage my teammates as a setter.
Goal for theteam: I would like the team to grow stronger together and understand how each other plays to encourage a stronger bond.
Through broader research about Theatre of the Oppressed, I concluded that focusing on internal oppressions instead of mental illnesses fits more with the applications of Boal’s theory. My supervisor suggested I find empirical research to support my essay; however, I realised that due to the abstract nature of theatre and its psychological impact, the most evidence I would be able to find is anecdotal. I contacted Theatre of the Oppressed companies to ask for accounts of their progress although very few responded. I was able to find testimonies from workshops and learn a bit more about determining whether or not a workshop was successful or not and looked into other approaches to overcoming internal oppressions such as using TO in Medical Humanities courses which I think adds an important element to my research. My supervisor advised that I should outline more clearly what types of internal oppressions I am exploring and what made individuals vulnerable to these oppressions.
This week we chose a poem as a stimulus and started exploring some of the ideas within it. We noticed that the poem, in talking about utopia, describes quite a dull atmosphere, with lots of monotony, although the initial introduction to the perfect world is idealistic and bright. We brainstormed ideas of how we can develop the ideas in the poem and found other stimuli to help us explore them in more depth. We then took some of the phrases from either the poem or ideas from the other stimuli to explore in movement patterns i.e. I suggested showing a tree growing using our hands from the ‘trees sprouting’ in the poem and the idea of routines that become more and more similar from the text ‘each day the same, drip drop, drip drop’.
I found a talk from an ‘ex-perfectionist’ who talked about having lists to fulfil so that she was perfect. This resonated with me as this was an idea we could explore.
