TEACHER RESOURCE PACK

THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASESFOR TEACHERS WORKING WITH PUPILS IN YEAR 1 – 3

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THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASESRUNNING FROM 18 SEP - 12 OCT 2014

LARRY’S GOT NO TIME FOR FUN, BUT THAT’S ALL ABOUT TO CHANGE...

Larry works in an office and he likes it very much. He likes sorting and tidying and generally putting things in order. Everything in its place, a place for everything.

But one day, a suitcase suddenly appears at his door. And this suitcase has a mission...

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CONTENTSCONTEXTINTRODUCTION TO THE PACK AND THE PLAY 4MAKING THE PLAY: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE CREATORS 5

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIESAN OVERVIEW OF CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES (Fully developed activities will be added in July) 8

THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASES

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INTRODUCTION TO THE PACK AND THE PLAYWelcome to the teacher resources for The Secret Life of Suitcases for children in Years 1 to 3.

The Secret Life of Suitcases is the charming story of Larry; a man who is so busy with his work, and so concerned with getting it all right, that he forgets to look up and around him and see what more life has to offer.

Larry works in an office and he likes it very much. He likes sorting and tidying and generally putting things in order. But one day, a suitcase appears at his door and it has a mission... Larry follows the magical flying suitcase and it takes him first outdoors to the park, and then on to an adventure further afield in space, where he meets ‘Quarks’ who have a very important job in the universe.

The pack which will be available online at the end of July will contain suggested activities that enable children to make, become and create stories using simple puppets and imagining the journeys they would most like to go on if they were sent a magical suitcase.

The activities provided can be used before or after your visit and use drama, storytelling, and writing as ways of exploring themes and events that are relevant to the play. They do not take an objective led approach; however, teachers will be able to establish links to the relevant curriculum objectives for their particular year group and can adapt them for their particular educational setting.

There will be opportunities for teachers to link the activities across the curriculum with particular relevance to reading, writing, spoken word, art and design and technology. For the adventurous, you can also touch on Quantum Physics for beginners!

Our teacher resources always put drama at the centre of our activities. Working through drama allows children to explore things that matter to them within a fictional context, draw on their prior knowledge and apply it to new situations, develop language as they give expression to new understandings and develop emotional intelligence and critical thinking as they see things from different perspectives. It will also allow the children to take responsibility, make decisions, solve problems and explore possibilities from within the drama.

The full pack will be available online by the end of July; in the meantime this shorter pack will give you an idea of what the play will contain and the potential for practical classroom work around your visit. There will be a free teacher CPD day for The Secret Life of Suitcases on Tue 9 Sep 10am – 4pm, which is a chance for teachers to find out more about the show and gain practical experience of the classroom activities, before leading them with a class.

To find out more about the CPD or book your place, email schools@unicorntheatre.com

CONTEXTTHE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASES

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MAKING THE PLAYAN INTERVIEW WITH THE CREATIVE TEAM: DIRECTOR LEWIS HETHERINGTON AND MAKER AND PUPPETEER AILIE COHENSCan you tell us what The Secret Life of Suitcases is about?

Lewis: It’s about a man who is so obsessed with getting everything right and getting everything ordered, just living his life as properly as he can that actually, he is missing out on life, he is missing out on the very ordinary but extraordinary things that are going on around him as he is buried in his own routine.

Ailie: He can’t let anything else in, he’s so busy with his own thing, his own way of doing things that he just can’t look up to see what’s happening.

Where did the original idea come from?

It started with suitcases, the things themselves and we decided they were interesting enough to base a show on.

When Ailie first suggested we make a show about suitcases I was excited; as a container for stories they give you a little clue for the outside. It’s like book covers, potentially there’s a whole microcosm of a life in there, what can you glean about a person, what they need, or want or feel and there’s the lovely reveal when you open the case.

Then quite early on we thought about the idea of work, I don’t know how we came about that, but we had those two things about work and suitcases. Because suitcases represent holidays, the counterpoint, the opposite, of that is work. So we had that duality; work and play, home and away.

We came up with Larry and another character early on and we knew the suitcase was going to fly and there was a station, there was a left luggage, a lost property station.

Why did you want the suitcase to fly?

There is something about it being magical. Suitcases are about transportation, and suitcases take you places. We had this image of Larry being taken somewhere in a flying suitcase and that image stayed with us.

How did you develop the piece after those initial ideas?

We went into nurseries and primary schools; we spent two weeks with a suitcase and tubes and with mock ups of puppets.

We hid loads of paper suitcases around the room; we didn’t know how they didn’t notice them! Inside each one was a jigsaw of where that suitcase had been, so they had to piece together the jigsaw to discover where it had been. The children had to decide where they would like to go on an adventure and then draw what they would need to take with them inside the suitcase. We wanted to find out what places were meaningful; so we asked them if we were to go on an adventure what sprung to their minds as an exciting place. The beach was very popular.

THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASES – CONTEXT

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Because we had this idea about work and play we wanted to know ‘is that just an adult connection (concept), is this meaningful to a child?’ The workshop reassured us that they do get that notion of work and business but obviously in a different way. It helped us start to formulate our ideas about Larry’s office and having tasks to do was something they related to. Their responses kept us on track because it was very easy for us to think as an adult about an office.

After the school workshops, we abandoned the second character (Harry) and just stuck with Larry. We realised the play was just about him and it was the suitcase that was trying to change his life rather than a human puppet character. Harry was mischievous and playful and said ‘hey look, let’s go and do crazy things in the outside world’. And actually it’s the suitcase that we want to do that. We realised that in 45 minutes it’s better to follow one character; it felt nice to hone in on Larry and spend the time with him.

Harry may get his own show one day; he’s got that jumper Ailie knitted him, a little tiny jumper out of copper wire.

After the two development weeks we brought Rick into the process (the second puppeteer). We had a wealth of stuff and we needed to start stripping it down by asking: What are the ideas we really want and how do we and push those? We always knew that Larry was a man who was obsessed by order; a suitcase was going to arrive and take him on a journey and bring him home again. That it would be a story about the thrill of adventure and the joy of coming home again. We had the very broad skeleton to go into the devising process with and then we had to find out the detail and the colour, how he felt about going and why he’s going and the various stages of the journey. And we had chunks of time between that so that Ailie could build the puppets.

How did you create Larry, the character and the puppet?

Initially it was a case of doing some sketches and drawings and then cutting him out in cardboard and being able to see him half a line, just on the page as a drawing. We liked Larry, because he was tall and we knew he would work well as a puppet so we would concentrate on making him.

The process of making him took around three weeks and that was from experimenting with different sized heads to get exactly the right scale. I mocked him up just using doweling and brought him into the rehearsal room for two weeks to see if he was the right size and how he was moving and if we liked him. Once we’d committed to using that character, I went away and constructed him in a way that he wouldn’t fall apart; using a combination of dowelling and leather for the joints and air drying modelling clay for the feet, harder modelling clay for the head and varnish and some craft fluff for his hair.

He is built as a mixture between a marionette and a rod puppet in terms of how he is jointed together because we knew we were going to have two people working him, so we could afford to make him flexible.

The design of Larry and the suitcases has a very strong aesthetic but then you’ve got the ‘Quarks’ which seem to come from another world or another show almost.

Yes they were a discovery in the rehearsal room for us, I thought ‘no, we can’t put them in there, they are ridiculous’. But it was exactly what we needed, all the brown leather is so beautiful and Larry is so beautiful and people say oh it looks like Romanian stop-motion animation and we thought, that’s brilliant, but we want to undercut that. It feels like we were nodding towards an aesthetic that you see a lot in children’s theatre; the old and nice vintage things. So we were excited about exploding that aesthetic a little bit and bringing a brand new element into it.

THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASES – CONTEXT

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In science, Quarks combine to form the components of atomic nuclei, can you tell us about the Quarks in your show?

We talked about quantum physics and the universe and all those kind of things. We tried an alien puppet talking about how the universe works and that seemed a bit po-faced, but when you have these completely absurd things, Quarks, who are the guardians of the universe, it lets you flirt with that idea of what the universe is philosophically, but at the same time undercut it and be really playful – not take ourselves too seriously.

The Quarks move so differently to Larry. Because Larry is jointed, he’s weighted, so his movement is placed and human. It was really nice to have other puppets who can defy all those laws; who can float and their movement is much more free form. This movement provides a visual language for the show; it’s about giving people a different quality to watch, which is exciting as an audience.

Ailie can you tell us what is happening when you animate Larry?

Firstly there’s the voice that helps me get into the mind of the puppet. Then there’s Larry’s story; what he’s experiencing at every point of the show. And there has to be an emotional resonance between me and the puppet. So I have to, as a puppeteer, feel what Larry’s feeling, but be relaxed enough in order to manipulate him so it reads for the audience. So I can’t get too involved as an actor - I think that maybe is the difference between an actor and a puppeteer, being a puppeteer is more like playing a musical instrument.

I also have to consider where is the puppet’s attention? What is the puppet looking at? Is the puppet looking at what I want it to look at? And then there’s another layer which is that you’re working with someone else, as a team, so you have to have the sixth sense of what you’re doing and what the other person is doing.

The challenge in the rehearsal room is that you need that relaxedness so that you actually don’t look at the puppeteer but at the puppet. At the beginning of the show Larry is really stressed out, but Ailie has to be frantic but also not there. If she embodies it too much then you start looking at the puppeteer not the puppet.

What happens in that moment when a puppet comes to life and we all believe in it together? It feels like a magical thing.

It’s a brilliant invitation to play, which so often theatre is. Clearly we all know this puppet isn’t a real person, but the game we all play is that we believe it’s real. You can see us make them move, the puppeteers are very visible, there’s no point in hiding them. And that to me feels like the brilliant game we’re all playing, we all know this is fake but actually let’s make that leap. Kids are brilliant at doing that and they really enjoy doing that. What I love about family audiences is the fact that kids do that so willingly and the adults, who are possibly a little less practiced, or not in the habit of making those playful leaps, they jump with the kids. It’s great with a school audience as well because you just feel that whole audience leaping with you.

THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASES – CONTEXT

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COMING SOON Full classroom activities will be added to this pack in July, after we have developed them with teachers and children in our partner school, Eleanor Palmer Primary. The activities will give a range of approaches to help you prepare pupils for seeing The Secret Life of Suitcases and extend the experience after wards.

Activities will allow the children to explore the world of Larry, the suitcases and the mysterious Quarks and use the theatre experience as a rich stimulus for further exploration.

ACTIVITIES MAY INCLUDE:

• Usingatemplateformakingyourowncutoutsuitcases–anactivitytoexploretheideaoftravelandadventure. Children can decide where they would most love to go in a magic suitcase. Having decided where they want to go, they can make a list then draw and cut out all the things they might need to take with them on their journey.

• Dramaworkthatincludesanexplorationofroutines;thethingsthatweliketodobecauseweknowhowtodothem,andwhatitfeelsliketostepoutsideoftheseroutinesandriskalittleadventure.Usingin-rolework, the children could be called upon to support someone who needs a little encouragement to step outside of their comfort zone.

• DramaorstorytellingactivitythatcentresonthechildrenimaginingtheyaretheQuarks–theyneedtodecide who in the world needs a suitcase sent to them and where that suitcase might take them.

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIESTHE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASES

THE SECRET LIFE OF SUITCASESAnAilieCohenPuppetMaker/Unicornproduction

CREATIVE TEAMBy Lewis Hetherington and Ailie Cohen Director Lewis HetheringtonDesigner Ailie CohenDevised with Rick ConteSoundtrack Niroshini ThambarLighting Andrew Gannon

Resource pack written by Catherine Greenwood