WHERE’S MY DADDY GONE?

Since September 2007, Navan Springboard Family Support Services host “He’s my Dad Group”  weekly meetings. Each member has their own unique experience as a lone parent, a house husband or separated father. All aspire to do their very best for their children.

In 2008, the group wrote, devised and recorded a radio play called “Where’s my Daddy gone?”, a dramatised representation of the experiences encountered by the members. Following the success of the play, produced by Lmfm and available on audio CD, Navan Springboard has approached Oulala Productions, a professional theatre company, to develop the project further.

The project will consist of workshops in Creative Writing and Drama with the group of fathers, to research, adapt and expand the script to a full-length stage play. This will be followed by rehearsals and a performance in a local venue.

We have identified that this project has the potential to:

Challenge unjust systems and structures – through exposing the lack of support experienced by fathers during a legal separation or divorce. Although the characters are fictional, the events depicted will be based on facts. All materials used during the devising process will be thoroughly researched and screened by the professionals of Springboard.

Benefit those on the edges of society – lone fathers or separated fathers will get the opportunity to meet and express their issues as well as their hopes through a creative process. This project will allow them to share the result with the larger public, in a balanced manner, and therefore to create awareness about their situation.

Promote justice, peace and the integrity of creation – the piece created with the fathers is not one-sided and presents both sides of a difficult, often ignored, situation. It aims at making people think, at breaking prejudice and it advocates tolerance and understanding.

Support the most vulnerable – here, the children estranged from their father are at the core of the problem exposed; it is their experience, as much as those of their father, which is observed and dramatised. We hope to give them a voice through the one of the children characters in the play.

Be educational and empowering – the fathers, guided by a professional facilitator, will learn new skills in creative writing, research, self-expression, presentation, acting, breathing and relaxation techniques. They will have, ultimately, ownership of the play they have created, the characters they will have developed and the themes they will have researched throughout the process.

Provide opportunities for human growth, community development and self-reliance – this project will remedy to the isolation experienced by the fathers, bringing them weekly as a working group. The nature of theatre production means that they will be brought to identify their strengths as well as their limitations as individuals, to learn how to work as a team to deliver specific tasks according to deadlines, to think and find ways to project themselves and their experience in a positive light, to gain understanding from their community and the public.

The key actions we propose to undertake in this project are?
Research of the themes: legal separation, divorce, fathers rights, personal experience and struggle for children and separated parents (both mother and father), support available, entourage’s influence and help/hindrance, stereotyping, etc.

Development of characters through creative writing and drama exercises.