Homeless People Documentary Analysis

Prior to the documentary workshops, I initially felt that all homeless people were on the streets because they had done something unacceptable and ‘deserved’ to be there, such as alcohol abuse or drug addiction, and when passing them on the street I would not really care about their situation because I had been taught as a child to stay away from strangers, so I chose to stay clear of them. When I was told that the drama workshop was about homelessness, I was a bit disappointed because I was expecting something more ‘serious’ like the refugee crisis or poverty, but once we had begun the topic, I began to really understand how serious the topic was.

In the first workshop, after reading a piece of written stimuli, we were given the task of creating a scene, from scratch, about two homeless people in a certain situation of our choosing. We then needed to incorporate various dramatic strategies into the scene, and portray the situation that these people were in (emotionally and physically), without giving any backstory. My partner and I chose a scene set in an underground station, where two young children, one of them in their late teens, and the other roughly 9 years old. The two children we were portraying would …show more content…
One performance by a different group that I really enjoyed was a realistic performance of a homeless person sitting in the middle of the stage, with the pedestrians walking behind her. If one of the pedestrians were to talk to or about the homeless person, they would walk forward so they were in front of the homeless person, and the people behind them would pause in a freeze-frame, passing the focus of the performance to the scene in front, then the speaker would deliver their dialogue, then return to the background and the pedestrians would unfreeze and carry