Collaborative Group Reflection

My collaborative group was formed out of necessity. There were five of us total in the course, which gave us a group of the perfect size for devising. The members of the group each brought unique strengths to our collaboration, and all were excited at the prospect of creating an original piece.
We had one member of our group who was a strong singer and had an interest in music as inspiration for our performance. She found songs that were relevant to our topic, and brought a special musical understanding to our devising process.
We also had members of our group from all socioeconomic backgrounds, which made our collaboration more diverse. As we explored various topics, we found many perspectives and ideas stemming from this background.
A difficulty

We all agreed that poverty would be a great place to start with our devised theatre piece.
From the starting point of poverty, we moved into discussion on the stereotypes surrounding poverty. We created a diagram of stereotypes of both rich and poor people, and compared them to the realities.
Through this exploration, we decided to focus in on the types of poverty that are not often spoken of. We wanted to show the non-stereotypical side of poverty. We noticed that the largest stereotypes of poverty were surrounding the reasons for poverty – addiction, laziness, and too many children. We decided we did not want to feed into these stereotypes and discuss these as reasons for poverty. Instead, we wanted to focus on reasons for poverty that get less attention – low-paying jobs and underemployment.
We each then found pictures representing poverty – one literal, and one abstract. We each wrote a monologue inspired by those photos, mimicking the moment work of Tectonic Theatre. We read our monologues aloud to one another, and offered critiques and opinions on the pieces. These monologues would ultimately create the base of our devised