Our next meeting of our group was with a workshop by Flickbook Theatre, who made their start the same way we were. They showed us many different techniques of how we could develop our ideas and turn them into a show.

The first technique that they showed us was the ‘Wikipedia Black Hole’, which is where each member of the company was given a word associated with one specific topic, in this particular case it was Donald Trump. So the words people were given were such things as Trump Tower, President, the White House and so forth, they would then type that word into Wikipedia, write some of the facts down about it on a post-it note and then click on a link to something else on that page and write about that on a different post-it note and so on for about 30 minutes. At the end of the 30 minutes we each presented our post-it notes, linking it to other peoples when we could, so at the end we were left with a wall covered in post-it notes that could all link together. This technique can help linking ideas or finding out a fair amount of information in a short amount of time. We used this technique to research and develop our understanding of 90’s culture, which later helped us decide upon which year we wished to base our production in. Which we decided would be 1997 as quite a few major historical events happened such as Princess Diana’s death and the publication of Harry Potter.

The second technique we were shown was having a table placed in the middle of the space and each member had to write a personal sad story and a personal happy story that included a table. The table did not have to be central to the story, it could simply just be in the room. One by one, each member would tell their story and place in other members to play the people in the story and use the table how they wished. This technique helped us learn that personal stories can be developed and worked into a piece of theatre, our stories can be manipulated and re-worked if needs be. This also helped us see that a simple piece of stimuli can be inspiration and lead to something more that can be used. By only using a table as well, it showed that set did not need to be extravagant, but could still be effective  and utilized for different purposes.