It’s Wednesday evening in Petaling Jaya - and I’ve learned lots of things today. Including …
- a peeled longan fruit looks suspiciously like an eyeball – but tastes delicious …
- a red light by a lift door doesn’t mean it’s broken – it means it’s going down (a pity it’s taken me so long to realise this, as I’ve spent hours sprinting between the sixth and second floors of the hotel) …
- being polite to the pool attendant can earn exemption from the “Strictly 12 and Under” rule regarding use of the slide.
And I’ve also learned, of course, that the young Malaysian people I’m spending the week with are every bit as enthusiastic about literacy as they are about maths. Preparing for SoundScape Poetry, the children split into three groups, each charged with selecting and pitching a setting for the eventual poems. Three brilliant presentations ensued, with “Ancient Rome” and “Mount Everest” narrowly losing out to “The Womb” (a location I can honestly say we’ve never had before). So, after creating soundscapes of life as a yet-to-be-born baby (!!) and, at the other extreme, being present at your own funeral, the participants settled down to crafting poems exploring these two poles of our existence through sound. Some were funny, others sad, all were touching – and all were packed full of richly descriptive language.
The afternoon saw us embarking on a tour of “Macbeth”, using drama activities and exercises to go right from the backstory (the war with Norway) to the crowning of Macbeth’s successor as King of Scotland. Although most of the young people had some knowledge of the narrative, hardly any had any experience of the text – but that didn’t stop them hurling themselves into iambic pentameter like The King’s Men themselves. And in a series of performances that imagined the great “unseen scene” of The Death of Duncan, one particular interpretation of a swooning Lady Macbeth completely stole the day.
And what about the period in between SoundScapes and The Scottish Play? That was devoted to Personification Poetry, a collaborative methodology we picked up and adapted from Michael Rosen (thanks, Michael!). Having agreed on an inanimate object they were all familiar with (the sign outside the multiplex cinema next door to the hotel), the youngsters delved deep into their own minds to imagine and share what the sign might hear and see, what it might remember – and what it might dream of. And these musings formed the foundations of some astonishing poems – one of which used the hook, “I wish people would stop looking at me!”
A little later, in the pool (just after I’d been down the slide), I looked up. And there, looming above me, was the multiplex. Mindful of the sign’s wishes, I looked down again. And helped myself to another longan fruit.