Creative Arts, Music, and Drama

Theatre Exercise and Mine

Creative Dramatics

• An informal, improvisational, non-exhibitional, process-centered form of drama in which participants are guided by a leader to imagine, enact, and reflect upon human experiences through role-play, improvisation, pantomime, movement, and sound.

(American Alliance for Theatre and Education: www.aate.org)

• It is “incorporating theatrical components and dramatic exploration into educational settings to support the child’s natural tendency to learn through play.” (PTM Creative Dramatics Program mission statement)

It is a distinct discipline, art form, teaching tool and educational process for teaching and learning; it is a hybrid between theatre and education.

(Nellie McCaslin's Creative Drama in the Classroom and Beyond.)

Purpose in Education

• Social Skills

• Individual Growth and Development

• Promotes physical, mental and emotional learning.

• Supports concentration, imagination, problem solving, and critical thinking.

• Enhances physical control and awareness; develops gross and fine motor skills.

Theatre

• is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place.

• The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance.

Types of Theatre

• Drama• Tragedy• Improvised• Comedy• Musical Theatre

Theatre Exercises

• Group Expression

• The facilitator calls out different states of being for the entire group to express themselves (either as a group statue or a moving mass). Some examples of states of being include: powerful, light, expansive, heavy, angry, sad, happy, nervous, or drunk.

Word at a Time• The players work in pairs. The facilitator

gives the players a title of a story. Each pair creates the story together, one word at a time (for example, Player A: ‘Once’, Player B: ‘upon’, A: ‘a’, B: ‘time’, A: ‘there’, B: ‘was’, and so on).

Charades

• is a word guessing game.

• it is an acting game in which one player acts out a word or phrase, often by miming similar-sounding words, and the other players guess the word or phrase. The idea is to use physical rather than verbal language to convey the meaning to another party.

Chinese Whispers

• Get your group into a circle, either seated or standing. Start by whispering a short sentence into the ear of the person next to you. Let the sentence travel around the circle in this same manner and see if it comes back to you the same as it started. The goal is to get it back intact, but it can provide some great fun when it goes horribly wrong.

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The Bears are Coming

• Difficulty: easyAge Range: 6-10

• Begin by telling a story to the children about an age without technology where people had to chop wood etc.

• All the children then have to find some physical action, based on an old fashioned job like wood chopping, hunting, or washing clothes and begin doing this action somewhere in the room.

• The teacher then leaves the room momentarily and returns as the bear.

• Once the bear arrives, the students must freeze where they are, and as the bear you must try to make the students laugh.

• If a student laughs they join you as a bear and you work together until you have made everyone laugh.

• Tip: The bears cannot touch the frozen children!

Mirror

• Purpose: A great way to get students aware of body movement and working together

• Pair students up and tell them to pick an A and B. Tell A’s that they are looking in the mirror. Tell them to move VERY slowly. B’s are the mirror and must follow A so closely that an observer would not be able to tell who is leading and who is following. Encourage them to mirror not only body movement but also facial expression. Have them switch after a minute or so. Then tell them that neither is the leader or follower. You will probably have tell them to go slower a few times. Start again with A’s but this time tell them that they are talking to themselves in the mirror as B’s follow. Again let them switch and then try it with no leader and no follower.

Backdrop

• Divide the class into groups of 4-8 players each.

• Each group must decide on an environment (i.e. the beach, a doctor’s office, a playground, a bus stop, etc.)

• The objective of the group is to create the scene’s environment without any one person being the center of attention. They can use their bodies as props/objects within the scene, use sound effects, become secondary characters, etc.

No, You Can't Take Me!

• This game teaches confidence, pantomime, and critical thinking. It's also a lot of fun. I have used it with children from Kindergarten to Middle School - obviously with varying levels of sophistication. It looks more complicated than it is - I've never had trouble making my students understand it.

• After explaining the game a little, break the class into small groups-three to five or so. Each group is given a room in the house--the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, the basement, the garage, etc. (You can use the bathroom as well if you think your students can handle it. Mine get too silly.) If you want to, you can put the names of rooms on cards and have each group draw one. Don't let the students know what rooms the other groups have.

• Within each group, each student chooses one thing that would be found in the room. (For example, if the room is the kitchen, one student might be the refrigerator, one the stove, one the sink, etc.) Side-coach as necessary. After choosing an object, each student practices "being" that object.

• Each student must think of at least one--or with older kids, several--good reasons that their object is important. Side-coach them to ask themselves what would happen if the thing were not there.

• Work with one group at a time. The other groups become audience--which is incidentally an opportunity to practice being a good audience.The teacher goes to the first group and exclaims, "My, look at all this useless stuff! I've got to get rid of some of this junk!" (Or some such.) The teacher selects one student and says, "I think I'll take THIS thing away."

• The student replies, "NO, YOU CAN'T TAKE ME!"• "Why not?"• The student answers, without mentioning the name of his object, in

this form: "If you take me away. . ." followed by something that would go wrong without the object

Seasons and Weathers

• I use this lesson with my first-graders when they are studying Weather. It is a way to physicalize some of the ideas they are learning about. But it also makes a strong improvisation game for older students, so I use it-with, naturally, some changes in sophistication-with my adolescent acting students.This lesson plan is written in the form of a narrative-a description of what happens in class when I teach the lesson.

• First Step: Thinking about it.• I begin by asking the students to think about the four seasons.What

are some of the activities you do most in each season? (Going to school, playing football, raking leaves, etc. in the Fall; swimming, going to camp, watching television, etc., in Summer; playing Little League, planting a garden, etc., in Spring; shoveling, skiing, playing hockey, etc., in Winter.)

• What kinds of weather do we tend to have in each season? (Sunshine, thunderstorms, heat in Summer, fog, hurricanes, cool in Fall, snow, sleet, icy winds in Winter, friendly rain, warm in Spring.)

• Second Step: Acting it out.Next I ask the students to imagine if is Fall (for instance). Think of an essentially Fall activity and begin to act it out. When I call out, "weather!" some kind of typical Fall weather will take place. Each student chooses for herself or himself which kind of weather it happens. When I call out, "weather!" everyone must react appropriately to whatever weather they are imagining.We repeat this with each season. Sometimes I'll call out "weather!" several times for each season.

• In my side-coaching I put a lot of stress on the senses. What does the weather sound like? Feel like? Does it have a smell? A taste? What do you see?

Red Light Stop• Hold up a fairly large red card or sheet of paper• Explain that the red light on the street means you should

stop. Hold up a green and an orange card and explain what they mean.

• Line the children up

• Tell them to start walking to the opposite side of the room.

• When you hold up the red card, they need to stop

• When you hold up the green card, they can now walk• When you hold up the orange card, they need to wait.• *if they did not follow, the police( the teacher) will capture

them.

Cross the Circle

• Form a circle with the children

• Have them count off by threes

• Give them directions for crossing the circle. (All #1 crosses the circle like a bunny; All #2 crosses the circle like a Kangaroo; All #3 crosses the circle like a fish)

Mime

• Mime is a form of acting and drama where the actor uses his body and gestures and also facial expressions rather than words to express his role.

• Drama started before the Greek times, it was created as a form of entertainment for the local people.

• Mime artists are called mimics, they exaggerate every move they make so it defines what they are trying to show.

• A mimic is an actor that acts without words and their entire performance is based on their non verbal gesture and bodily movements.

Famous Mime Artists

• 1. CHARLiE CHAPLiN

• 2. Mr. Bean / Rowan Atkinson

• 3. MARCUS MARCEAU