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CHAPTER FIVE: DATA ANALYSIS
The space offered a productive duality. It was familiar to some extent, and
connected with the wish of most children to be hidden from adult eyes,
but on the other hand it was also clearly fictional, because they created it.
This picture created by one of the participants shows the train station in
the middle, beside the track. With an adult world that is recognisably real
on the other side of the track. Above the McDonalds and Aldi logo stands
the sign of the Westend’ shopping mall, Central Europe’s largest shopping
centre that is only a five-minute’s walk from the school.
As one of the participants of the last focus group explained “the station
was the main point in the story. They wouldn’t have come together if there
wasn't this place. There wouldn’t be a community”.* This quote shows
the importance of the space for the participants and its significance in
the story, but it also shows that the meaning of the space became quite
symbolic, quite general: the community. For participants to be able to use
the space in improvisations it would have been better if different parts of it
carried different possible meanings, perhaps working on significant events
that happened in different parts of their pitch could have created that.
While it was the familiarity of this space that triggered the participants’
imagination, it was the foreignness of the island that grasped the participants
of The Tribe drama series. It reminded them of native American tribes and
shipwrecks®*> and made them reflect on their lives full of computers, gadgets
and homework. They were interested in thinking about what it would be like
to live on the island, they connected nature to living a more human life and
contrasted it with the social pressures in their life, for example because of
being overweight, as this excerpt shows:
623 https://westend.hu/
64 F_G3.
625 F GI.
+ 186 +