In the Studio 13 The Miss Hibbs method

Anna Maria Murphy suggests more ideas to help you, inspired by Cornwall teacher, Miss Hibbs, whose technique of breaking down stories to basic headlines underpins much of the devising process for Kneehigh’s work:

Miss Hibbs used to break stories down with her young people into a number of chapter headings or headlines. She would encourage you to tell the story in as few headlines as possible i.e 5 or 7 or maybe 9. (she would like it to be an odd number!) Then Miss Hibbs would get her class to choose one headline or story point and just write about that. It is an excellent way of understanding structure and keeping things simple and energised.

Practise Task

Take a well known fairy or folk tale, e.g.: Red Riding Hood or The Three Little Pigs. In a group decide among you the main points of the story, then tell the whole story is 5 tabloid headlines.

These are your “scenes” if you like. Once you have these, you can play around with the order. In Tristan and Yseult we started the play at the end, went full circle, then back to the end again. Be playful with your structure and storytelling. 

Then write the themes of the story, as many as you can: i.e. adventure, hunger, danger etc. However many you have generated, then reduce them to just three. Write these three in large letters somewhere, as they will be the beating heart of your story, and keep returning to them.  From this , make your own storyboard, both useful for film, theatre, dance, design, music etc.

We would do this at the start of any Kneehigh creative process.