Thursday 14 July 2016

PRIMARY 3 - Who Knows A Clapping Game?

By Georgia Clark

This was the first question put to us at the third of our explorations into ‘Primary Schools’. A mixture of tentative and enthusiastic hands went up, and those that didn’t know a clapping game were soon learning one from someone in the group that did. It did seem to fit the stereotype at first that it was predominantly the younger people and females in the group who had a game to teach, but the games and chants soon proliferated around and before long people were sharing their newly learnt game with someone else.


A simple exercise, but it brought the intergenerational value into sight as younger and older shared clapping games from their days in the playground, intersecting age, background and gender. Conversations I had with people that evening emphasised the value in the wide variety of people that take part in these sessions; a returning member said she comes back because ‘it’s inclusive, being here isn’t dictated by age or anything else’, another person who enjoyed her first session at Bubble last week, and plans to come back, shared her first impression of the group - ‘it’s interesting how many different backgrounds and ages there are here’.

When showing the clapping games back to each other, we pondered as a group what it is that makes clapping games an enduring phenomenon -  are they just something to do to extinguish playground boredom? Is it about something creative? Or is it about winning? A mum and daughter showed us back a clapping game that elicits a winner and a loser, the mum squealing as she made a mistake and lost. It seemed there was pleasure to be had in racing to go as fast as you could, with a mistake costing you the game.

Tic-tac-toe
Give me a high
Give me a low
Give me a three in a row
Don’t get hit by a UFO

Now who can remember making or looking at a ‘nature table’ at primary school? This was next on the evening’s agenda; in small groups we set about making our own ‘nature table’, the contents of which would be centred on one topic and could be as wide and as playful as our roaming imaginations. Groups set off round the Bubble building and surrounding park gathering objects to illustrate their chosen theme, thinking also about how to arrange and 'present' their table to the rest of the group. It was a rewarding exercise in thinking laterally about a topic and tuning into environment to spot objects that would convey an aspect of something, as well as an exercise in teamwork.

Attention and importance was given to the process of explaining and demonstrating the contents of each nature table; the group curating ‘water’ demonstrated buckets and bottles and watered some plants in front of us, the ‘rainbow’ team were inspired by the brightly coloured T shirts of the group and incorporated themselves into their nature table (the inclusion of the white/off white/yellow toilet roll caused confusion and discussion as its colour was debated!). It was interesting how the other themes - pets, summer, an office - had a similar simplicity and naivety to them. Maybe this was a reflection of how we were approaching the broader subject matter at the moment, or perhaps to do with people gently getting to know each other.


We wondered what our ‘nature tables’ of primary school might look and feel like if we were to curate one about school celebrations or teachers, or maybe school dinners, or the playground. A group applied this to 'school chants' by asking to be greeted with 'good morning everyone' before replying in monotonous unison with 'Good morning Mrs. Henderson’. What might the others be like?

And what if we did one about teachers? We would need to include their mannerisms and body language; it was time to get into our bodies and relive the physicality of being in that environment. To get this started we mirrored a partner’s movements in pairs, echoing the lines their limbs sketched out, and then mimicking the particularities of how that person walks across the room and sits in a chair. Watching these back as a group was entertaining and brought out people’s different nuances, it was a chance to get to know each other non-verbally by noticing each other’s movements and relationship to space.

Translating this into recalling our teachers movements brought into sharp relief some of the particular movements and body language we remembered from school. We curated these in small groups to perform back; the sharp, energetic and demonstrative pointing of one teacher balanced by the still, moody, expectant stance of another. Theatrical and dynamic sketches were beginning to emerge…

Thursday 7 July 2016

PRIMARY 2 - Salutes and Lifts

By Georgia Clark


At our second meeting the previous week’s memories of primary school had been strung back up and welcomed returning and new faces alike. After we had explained to those joining us for the first time what we had done the previous week, new faces were invited to add their memories to the collection.

Meanwhile, returning faces were asked to travel in their mind to a particular room, place or short journey that was significant in their experience of primary school, and write about it or draw it in detail. To begin unlocking some of the details of school buildings and our journeys to them we were asked to think about the smells, sounds and qualities of that place. 

We had begun the session with an amusing game of creating a ‘salute’ for each other in partners that were based on our day’s activity. We shared these back to the group, along with our names, and proceeded to wander around the room in wonderful chaos communicating with each other through our personalised salutes; it felt like the awkwardness and hilarity of this had shaken off some initial shyness at being in the same space, and enabled us to arrive in the room and be present together in some way.

With this initiation behind us, and a collection of new memories amassed, we re-joined as a group to listen to the memories of childhood which had just been harvested. The terrain was becoming more familiar now to those of us returning, and the recurrence of themes and images provoked great enjoyment or disgust in turn.



The exercise of taking a person to our chosen spot felt evocative for me, reminding me of how space affects our thoughts, feelings and movements, and vice versa. I took my partner inside the lift at the foot of the stairs in the Bubble building, which for me represented the phone box in my primary school boarding house where we'd take turns to slot our pre topped up phone cards in to the machine to call our parents. The tinny and unsentimental atmosphere of the lift lent itself well to transporting my partner and I to the place in my memory. I also listened to my partners chosen place, a section of the library with beanbags and stacks of books which you could retreat to in the early years of primary school, a comforting place to travel to which softened the rigidness of the lift.

Others travelled to their first aid room which ‘smelled of disinfectant but at the same time, biscuits’, or  classrooms with ‘the smell of school dinners’ wafting in through the door and ‘loads of colourful stuff on the walls’, music halls filled with piano notes, ‘a garden at the end of the playground’, spaces filled with sounds of ‘singing, giggling, laughter, footsteps and chatting’, a library with wooden shelves and tables, a dining hall with a cheerful dinner lady and the smell of fish fingers.

This felt like an exercise in tuning our senses in to the material, and preparing to recognise the sensory elements when ‘foraging’ for more information. The focused one to one listening about ‘place’ also felt like a precursor to the interviews ahead which some of us will carry out.

In a final task we considered how we could gather material about some of the different themes we had established, which generated ideas about things to begin looking for and bring to the next session; clapping games, school timetables, report cards, school songs.