This is my online diary that describes my participation in the Critical Links Theatre project, supported by the Educational Theatre Association and the Arts Education Partnership.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

How Critical Links changed my approach to teaching theatre

This fall, I began my 16th year of teaching theatre in a public magnet school. Before that, I had been teaching acting in studios and workshops for many years. There are days when I still long for the "purity" of the studio approach. In a private studio, I didn't have to worry about such things as formal assessments, state standards, school uniforms and other such intrusions on the "art" of it all. Studio teaching was pure process with focus on individual needs.

In the first year of Critical Links, I looked at the problem of voice training for the young actor. I wanted to find methods that improved both projection and diction without stressing those who are shy about their voices. I used my four exploratory drama classes to experiment with techniques and refine the process. By learning how to collect the data, I was able to see and hear the improvement in my students. By refining the methods I had developed over the years and focusing on combining sound and movement in all the exercises, I found that students were less stressed and enjoyed the work more, and were able to eventually present a performance of poetry with actions in confident full voices. I have continued to work on vocal training this year utilizing what I learned in those exploratory classes in all my drama classes.

Last year's immersion in the Critical Links process has opened my eyes to what is possible within the drama classroom -- despite all the bureaucratic limitations. I began the fall of 2008 with greater purpose and definite goals in mind that would reshape the way I'd been teaching. Year 16 begins the second half of a projected 30 year public school teaching career (as long as good health is maintained, I hope to achieve that longevity goal). Over the summer, I thought long and hard about what I had accomplished during the first 15 years, and what things I might to do improve.

It would be easy to just drift along on what had been accomplished before, using the same old format and the same materials year after year. Haven't we all had teachers who haul out the same old dusty notes and hand out the same assignments year after year? The Critical Links experience shakes up the old habits by creating a new and valuable one -- the habit of taking stock of what you are doing and asking many questions about the process and the results.

I have always had a keen interest in the sciences, and for many years have looked at acting classes as experimental laboratories where actors explore physiology and the physics of motion, the chemistry of interactions and the biology of emotions. Critical Links provided a way of viewing my teaching process within in a scientific structure that involves selecting a problem, analyzing it and coming up with a hypothesis, then testing it and collecting data along the way.

So I began this year with a critical eye focused on all my classes. What were the problems hiding beneath the surface? What wasn't working so well and what could be improved? What new ideas could I bring to the classroom?

I found some answers at the annual Educational Theatre Association's conference in Chicago this past September. I only recently began attending these conferences and have found them to be invaluable resources. The workshops alone are worth the price of admission, and add in the round table discussions, the marquee addresses by leaders in the field and the impressive array of vendors displaying scripts, technical goods and services and field trip opportunities -- this conference is a must for theatre teachers.

I took a workshop on reality theatre, and immediately knew that this was a format I could utilize in teaching. I have been experimenting with it on the topic of bullying and will be blogging more about this in the second semester.

I also attended an all day session on drama and autism, which gave me very helpful insights into the problems and possible solutions in working with students who have Asperger Syndrome. I also attended a conference at Kent State University over the summer on autism spectrum disorders. The number of students who enter our program who are high level autistic or are identified as AS have increased over the years. Drama is an art form that can give these students a grounding in learning how to read emotions in other people and can help them learn how to communicate and collaborate.

Another areas of concern for this school year is developing more valid means of assessment beyond the obligatory letter grade. I am working on creating electronic portfolios for each student by collecting a video sample pantomime, monologue, duet or scene for each student at the end of each semester.

My final goal is to reconnect with this blog and record my ups and downs as a theatre teacher within the context of the Critical Links Process. All of our original first year group are now preparing to lead new participants through the Critical Links process and we are all encouraged to continue working on our own projects and problems as well. Over this winter break, my intent is to summarize the work I began in the first semester and set out plans of action for the second.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Voice and Movement training -- results!

I was really thrilled with the results of my voice and movement training project. View the video footage and see for yourself!

Part one (features training in class, rehearsals and final performance): go here.

Part two (with amazing before and after footage!) go here.

You can read all Critical Links in Theatre Education here, including mine (second from the bottom of the list.)

Here's the summary of the results:

Some students are terrified of the sound of their own voices. Others can be nervous about references to any voice “problems” such as fluency, tone, projection or articulation. Such students have a difficult time with training that centers upon each individual voice. To stand in front of a group and speak can be excruciating torture! Voice training doled out, as a unit of focused learning, can be a time of great discomfort for such students.

On the other hand, some students are very shy abut their bodies and have a difficult time letting go physically, which is what has to happen if you want to transform yourself into a character.
I wanted to find out if combining actions and sounds would be a more effective means of improving students’ voices and actions rather than focusing on each aspect individually.

The set up for my experiment was this:

A 5th grade drama exploratory class consists of a 9-week course meeting four days per week, 42 minutes per session. The student population consisted of a mix of arts students in the following areas: dance, drama, vocal music, instrumental music and visual art. Student academic achievement is represented across a spectrum from special needs/special ed to gifted and talented.

My broad outline for the 9-week class:

Students would use Shel Silverstein poetry as both process and performance material. Initially, each student would have his/her own poem to memorize and physicalize. Additionally, I selected two poems that would be large group pieces, dividing the class in half and assigning each group one of the poems along with a student “director.” The goal was to use the material for voice and movement training, adapting and/or combining my usual exercises in a way that both body and voice were involved for most of the training. Another goal was to create a class performance of the material that would presented to the school at the end of the 9 week course.

Day One: “A get to know you exercise” in talk show format. Drama students acted the role of talk show host, with “guests” from all the other arts areas. This initial assessment gave me an idea of who looked comfortable on stage and who looked and sounded shy.

Day Two: Students were each given a unique Shel Silverstein poem to read out loud as a “before” sample of a cold reading. These were all videotaped and saved.

Then began weeks of work with the poems. The humorous Shel Silverstein poetry was challenging yet fun for the students to tackle. The words, rhymes and rhythms, the silly images all helped to inspire movement. At first I had the students work in pairs, finding actions for each other’s poems. As one would speak the words, the other would try out actions to go with the words. Some pairs found that their poem required both to contribute actions. The actors were encouraged to explore all the possibilities together.

Class would begin with warm-ups that focused on sound and movement, building from breathing and resonance to articulation games. I used some basic Kristen Linklater exercises in breathing and resonating, but rather than do them on the floor in a relaxed mode, I had the actors moving in the space, so always the body was engaged while the voice was producing sound. For articulation, the actors conversed with consonant sounds such as Buh and Duh (the uh representing the exhalation of breath behind the consonant sound. Then we reversed the sounds so that articulators were worked on the end sounds: uB and uD. Actors were encouraged to express meaning with gesture and actions as they “conversed.”

Other vocal games included moving in the space and working on one particular word (from their individual poems) exploring all the possibilities of communicating the word with vocal and physical choices. Word Tennis is a game that allows actors to play with word sounds and qualities as one word is “tossed” or “delivered” back and forth between players across a distance.
One thing I observed is that all the actions helped to strengthen voices with a kind of aerobic effect. Additionally, when students are all working on voice in one space, they will get louder without prompting.

Many of the moving in the space games come from my studies with Jairo Cuesta and Jim Sloviak of the New World Performance Lab. “Taking care of the space” is an important task that actors must return to again and again. By taking care of the space, I mean being aware of oneself in relation to the other actors and to the space itself.

A favorite spatial awareness game is having actors move according to various qualities and concepts as expressed with adjectives like “crooked, “straight,” “tense,” “loose,” and so on. I enhanced this game by having actors select one word from their poems to use as they moved within the space and applying the given concept or quality to the way they voiced the word while they also made up movements. For example, the word selected might be “twistable” while the concept given was “crooked.” The actor might explore inflecting “twistable” in a way that bent the separate syllables using pitch changes – all the while the actor’s body is also working out a crooked walk and actions.

The second half of class was given to the actors to work on their poems as performance pieces. The actors made artistic choices throughout the creative process. Time was given to the large group poems as well, so that everybody was performing in something large and small. For most of our rehearsal time, we worked in the Little Theatre. Two weeks before we were to have our final performance, I scheduled some rehearsal time in the large 956-seat auditorium. We played some vocal/physical games in that space to explore the difference in projecting, resonating and articulating in such a large area. The students had no problems adjusting.

The students performed their poems before the school at the end of March. They were very pleased with the reception from the audience. After the class was over, I did a survey of the students and the teacher to gauge their response to the work. Many stated that they felt more confident about speaking in public and some wrote that they were now mindful of articulation and projection.

A month after the class had ended, I asked the actors to do another cold reading in front of the camera. They came in at lunch time in groups of two and three over several days. I gave them a Lewis Carroll poem that is fun to read but has a few challenging words in it. The before and after footage for each student can be seen at the end of the video documentary. The results are visually and audibly clear. The student improvement can be seen in improved eye contact and posture. Confidence is markedly improved along with projection and articulation.

I will continue to combine voice and movement training in my exploratory classes and also in warm-up work for play rehearsals. Rather than put young actors on the spot for not being loud enough or for not taking any risks with movement explorations, this work allows them to develop within the safety of a group and yet stretch their vocal muscles as well as their arms, legs and spines. The student actors are given many opportunities to hear and see others growing more confident and articulate at the same time, which has a positive effect upon their own work.

Ample opportunities to present student work in front of the class gives everybody confidence. Students develop analytical eyes and ears as they practice giving feedback to each other.

Also in the future, I would like to test the work on actors in high school and also within populations of students who are not in a performing arts school. I would also like to develop a course of training for academic teachers interested in incorporating these techniques into an academic class.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Critical Links Projects online

The Critical Links in Theatre Education first year projects are online. Go here to read the complete story.

It's a nice solid core of research studies centered on theatre ed in middle and high school. We are looking to expand the research this year, in our local communities and online as well.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Critical Links Year 2

We're back in Cincinnati for the first of three meetings in year two of our Critical Links in Theatre Education project. The original 12 teachers are now ten. It is amazing, really, that ten theatre teachers could find the time to commit to this process. As one after the other of us noted today, our school years are packed full of shows and all the rehearsal time leading up to all those opening nights.

It isn't uncommon for a high school theatre teacher to be responsible for 8 or 9 productions per school year. And at the same time, we have lessons to plan for all the classes we teach. As a middle school teacher, I don't direct as many shows -- however, I always find ways to cast many students in my shows and I can testify to the exhaustibility factor in working with 50 - 80+ 4th through 8th graders per production!

Nevertheless, the ten of us found the time and the motivation to investigate a critical teaching question last year. Our projects are almost ready to be revealed online. We had a sneak preview today and we were all suitably impressed with not only the individual work, but with seeing a collection of research studies in educational theatre. Once the work is officially released to the public, I will post a link here for sure.

Looking at the work today was a powerful stimulus for beginning this "critical" second year of the project. Each of us have been asked to become facilitators of the project in our home districts. We will be leading other teachers through the process of rigorous inquiry into individual teaching questions. We are also being encouraged to work on a question along with our team members. It could be continuing the question from the first year or a new one entirely. I have a good idea what mine will be and I do intend to report on it in this blog as I did with the voice and movement training from last year.

On a personal level, I am so grateful for this opportunity to meet with my peers to investigate problems in theatre ed. Going through the process has already made permanent changes in the way I approach my teaching. I am much more interested in collecting evidence on student improvement. This year, I've begun a monologue project in every grade level, for example -- one per semester. I plan on video-recording the monologues and keeping them in electronic portfolios for each student so that we can observe growth over the years the students are in the program.

So thank you Educational Theatre Association, Critical Links, Arts Education Partnership and the Ohio Arts Council. Not just thank you for my own personal growth and benefit from participating in this project, but thank you for the support that benefits our students in the theatre classroom, and ultimately for helping us all to show how theatre education makes essential contributions to every child's learning process.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Findings

We are gathering tomorrow to present our research at the end of year one with Critical Links.

I put together a 13 minute dvd with footage taken throughout the 9 week exploratory drama course. At the end, the class performed their poetry for the entire school and I videotaped that as well. I'm very happy with the results, as I was able to track the progress of individual students as well as documenting the process.

A month after the class was over, I gave the students a survey about their experience. Most of them felt their voices had improved, along with their confidence in front of an audience. I also queried the home room teacher who pointed to some specific student improvements she has witnessed in her academic classroom in terms of student vocal expressiveness.

As a final test, I asked five students from the class to come to the Little Theatre at lunch time this week to try a cold reading in front of the camcorder. I gave them another poem, verses from The Walrus and the Carpenter, to read out loud. When I paired these samples with their initial cold readings from the beginning of the course almost 4 months ago, the improvement is undeniable. They project, speak with greater articulation and confidence. Four out of five make contact with the camera throughout their readings.

The obvious reason that adding actions to the vocal exercises worked so well is that it helped them build up lung power. I never really had to prompt to improve projection. The more work we did in the space, moving and making sounds, the stronger their voices grew. Articulation became a very physical process for them.l A powerful moment can be seen on the video -- when I asked them to try putting their hands over their mouths and articulatory muscles and jaw while speaking. You can see them feeling where the sounds are shaped and realizing that muscles are involved in speech.

The actions also worked to release creativity. All the poems were staged by the students themselves. This gave them even more ownership of the process and also enhanced their collaboration skills.

Some areas I would like to learn more about would be finding ways to help students who have difficulty finding the flow in reading material out loud. One student who is in drama has great difficulty reading text outloud. She stumbles and stutters when confronted with written text, but once memorized, she delivers her lines with ease, projecting and articulating.

Another problem I'd never encountered was a student who clipped vowel sounds very short in all cases. Stretching vowels was something she had never considered. Her habitual mode is rapid delivery with very short clipped vowel sounds. The vowel stretching exercise helped somewhat. The biggest change is that she is more inclined now to slow down her rate of speech but still hasn't mastered the flexibility and emotional content inherent in lengthened vowel sounds.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Words and Actions and Warmups

Recently I've had occasion to observe some other folks warming up before rehearsals near and far. One thing I've noticed is a form of working in a circle that seems to be popular in college theatre. Student teachers have been using the game Zip Zap Zop for a number of years. It's the kind of game that requires strict attention and focus in order to keep the flow running smoothly. According to Wikipedia, it is folkloric in origin. If you know the original source for this game, I'd love to hear it.

Other similar games include passing words and/or actions along the circle in two different directions so that at certain points words and actions cross each other and give one person a very difficult task to handle them at the same time. My current student teacher has been working with our advanced acting class on this one and they are finding it quite the challenge.

Observing a rehearsal in NYC last week, I saw another form of this circle work in which one person ducks while the people on either side clap hands over the top of the ducking person's head. Then the clapper to the right must duck and the clapping is repeated from the person's on either side -- around and around it goes. The goal is to be precise enough to achieve unity in the actions and sounds.

The group I watched playing this game was comprised of high school students and they were very attentive. The focus was intense. It was quite clear that the few fluffs were not amusing or acceptable to the participants. In so many of these games, a miss is cause for merriment rather than renewed focus. I mus say, this group of teenagers were right on the mark with their warm-up.

They also did a neat sound and action vocal warm-up. They tossed invisible baseballs using a "huh" sound to power their actions. After a number of baseball tosses, they moved on to tossing shot-puts which required a stepped up physical action and deeper in the belly "huh" sound. Definitely an exercise worthy of incorporating into a warm-up.

For articulation, a group leader gave them ever-increasing-in-length tongue twisters. As they were about to run through a Shakespeare play, they definitely needed to wake up the articulators. I think they might try adding some actions to the tongue twisters as well. Perhaps walking their character and using the rhythms of the tongue twisters to propel themselves through the space.

What was missing from this warm up was just that -- actors moving in the space. Lots of the circle stuff which is very good for building focus and ensemble energy, yet most plays are not acted around the perimeter of a circle.

"Working the space" is an exercise that can be adapted endlessly for any particular needs. The first task of the actors is to keep the space balanced at all times. That means there are no gaps and no crowds, always bodies moving at approximate equidistant to each other. "Balance the space" is the coaching term that should always prompt actors to be mindful of their actions within the context of the group and the space itself.

Once the group is achieving balance, then coaching can take on the "how" of the bodies moving within the space. Oppositions of qualities are very useful: Thick/Thin; Tall/Short; Sharp/Smooth; Rigid/Loose; Angular/Curved; Heavy/Light and so on. One can spend an entire lesson on taking qualities and working them using a numeric scale. For example 1 being Most Heavy , 5 being Neither Heavy or Light, and 10 being Lightest. It is in this exercise that actors begin to work on nuances brought about by different levels of energy. One can point out the forms of theatre that practically demand extreme actions (commedia, circus) and those that work at more subtle levels (film acting).

There are many other qualities one can explore in the balancing of the space exercise. Younger actors quite enjoy animal qualities. You don't want them to literally act out an elephant, let's say, but rather find the qualities of elephant movement within their actions: heavy, majestic, trunk to tail follow the leader, swaying torso and head etc.

For more work like this, check out this recent book on Grotowski by Akron-based theatre artists James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta of The New World Performance Lab. The Routledge series of great acting teachers and their theories features a biographical/ theory analysis in the first half and instructional techniques in the second half. Great stuff!

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Voice and action catch up

I haven't had time to keep up with the blogging on my voice and action project, but the project itself kept moving along, despite fits and starts due to weather and unscheduled days off from school.

The class brought their work to performance level and presented it to the entire school this past Wednesday. I videotaped it from way in the back of the auditorium. It will be interesting to hear the results when I download the footage into iMovie.

Everybody in the class originally had a poem to perform. We couldn't perform all of them for the school due to time constraints, so I had the students combine their groups of 2 or 3 with another group of 2 or three. They could choose two poems, one from each group to work on as a performance.

The final presentation would also include the large group poems. The class had been divided in half for these poems, with two 5th grade drama students as directors. We started the show with Nobody and ended it with Twistable Turnable Man.

My initial reaction to the end result is that while my goal was to improve vocal quality and skills, my eyes were drawn to the originality and expressiveness of the student-created actions that sprang out of the text. I expect to report more as I put together a video time-line of the project. I also will be giving the students a survey to gain their insights as participants in the project. To gauge possible long-term improvements, I am working with the home room teacher to arrange a video taping in the classroom in which students read/recite out loud text connected to an academic subject.

I have one more section of 5th grade exploratory that just began this past week. We haven't begun training yet as their starting coincided with tech/opening of our spring musical. I am planning on using the same techniques I have refined in this past experiment.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Catching up with the work

Weather and personal days off have kept me from this diary, but the work has continued on with some starts and stops along the way. I did take two days to show the class a Charlie Chaplin film. I have made it my mission as a drama teacher to expose every student who comes into my Little Theatre to the work of Charlie Chaplin. This group watched City Lights and enjoyed it immensely.

The class now has two choral pieces and a bunch of individual Shel Silverstein poems that they have been working on. As we can't perform every single poem, we are going to combine pairs into quartets. They will pick two poems from their four possible choices and add in actions for all four actors.

One day last week, we worked with concept words (rough, smooth, bumpy, tall, thin, etc) -- moving in the space to the words, then applying that to the poems. Sometimes the concept words were not ones that normally would leap to mind when working out the actions to the poems -- but we found that these odd juxtapositions often added something delightfully new to the interpretation.

One observation I've been noting is how projection has increased among all students -- without any need for me to coach for that specifically. I'm hoping we can get into the auditorium this week for some work in the larger space. There are only three more weeks before this class ends.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Choral speech

Four day work week, and only three of those days will be spent with my 5th grade group. Time to change it up. and move on to choral work.

I handed out a copy of Shel Silverstein's Twistable, Turnable Man to the class. Since everybody was looking at the poem as it was handed to them, there was no way I could capture a true cold reading -- but that was ok. A first time group effort is bound to be ragged, so I asked them to think up tactics that would help them in reading it cold. They talked about slowing down, about looking for punctuation, and about listening to each other as they read. All really good suggestions!

We read through it and it wasn't horrible, with only a few spots of jumbled voices and out of synch speech. We discussed what happened and the poem itself. What it was about. Which were the action words, the adjectives and nouns -- but in terms of performance rather than language arts quiz questions. Since we have been working on physicalizing words, they were quick to locate the verbs and visualize what possible actions could accompany them. The adjectives apply the colors, tastes and textures of the scene, while the nouns are actors and props.

I gave them another Silverstein poem called Nobody which we read through together. Again, the work was not bad for a first run through. I then had the class count off in twos, and gave the ones Twistable Turnable Man and the twos Nobody. I appointed a choral leader for each group, selecting two drama students in order to give them directing opportunities.

They practiced at either end of the room. I put two costumes racks as barricades, to keep them from distracting each other and to help buffer the sound a bit. By the end of the period, one group was well on its way to finding actions to match the poem. The other group was having some conflicts.

Today, the groups continued to work on their poems. I noticed that the Nobody group's leader was trying to make the process "democratic" by asking everybody for their opinion. They were getting bogged down in conflicts over suggestions. I talked to them briefly about how some works require a single viewpoint -- does an orchestra require ten conductors?

The Twistable Group had gone a long with its leader's vision, and was well on its way to creating a performance. Both groups will polish their work tomorrow and present to each other at the end of the class.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Articulation and movement

This week has been truncated by weather and a day off for staff development (tomorrow), so I've only had this class twice, but both sessions went really well. I taped a lot of it, even though I didn't blog it. Days off mean that the subsequent days back are twice as hectic.

Basically, I used my usual articulation exercises but enhanced them with movement instructions. We built on the vowel work, which helps actors understand the power of lengthening vowel sounds in words. Lots of Word Tennis with vowels and then consonants. We start with sounds, then go to words, and then to a specific word from each actor's poem.

Today we moved to the initial line of each poem, using it as the only line of conversation in pairs, back and forth. "Try to make it a meaningful conversation, even though you can only use that one line over and over," I coached. "Physicalize it when you respond," was another coaching prompt.

I gave them ten minutes to go back to their original poem partners to work on their presentations. For the last ten minutes of class, we looked at volunteer performances as "works in progress." The improvement was manifest! I asked them at the end what they had noticed in the presentations in terms of change over time. "More expressive!" "Using articulation!" "Stronger voices" "Projection!" The latter has come about without any prompting! All the shy voices are noticeably stronger -- and I believe it comes from the physical work added to the voice training. Next week, we will go into the auditorium, a much larger space and do some deliberate projection work to build upon what they have already achieved.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Meeting wrap up

The focus of this weekend's Critical Links meeting was to focus in our questions with the collective wisdom of our colleagues providing much additional insight.

Here are some notes from the weekend that will influence the direction of my continued research:

The video collection of student work is powerful stuff. I need to edit into a time-line one or two students to show their progress over time.

It was suggested that I also include video of "the teacher in action with the class."

Another great suggestion: to show that the work applies in academic areas, arrange to shoot some footage of this class doing some kind of oral presentation in their home room class. I would look for something in the final quarter of the year to see how much of the work has been retained and can be applied.

To make this a valid study, I would need to document a class that is taught in traditional voice-focused methods, along with a control group that has no voice training whatsoever.

Interview the students whose work I am collecting.

Observe how resistance to change may be overcome by the physical work.

We were not in school today due to sub zero wind chill temps. A big snow storm might keep us out tomorrow.

When I do meet with this class again, we will be working with projection and articulation exercises combined with physical actions. More "Word Tennis" and conversations with consonants.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Meeting Two Cincinnati, Feb 9 - 10

Day one went by so quickly, I need to stop and reflect upon it before the next day dawns.

The first hour was spent sharing our teaching and personal lives with each other. The depth and breadth of theatre teaching knowledge round our table is a powerful support for all our individual goals. We come at theatre from all directions: our programs range from elementary to middle to high schools, and include vocational, parochial, and performing arts schools, in the form of either co-curricular or extra-curricular. We teach in urban, rural and suburban landscapes, and our populations are varied in terms of socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity, and special needs students.

Most of us are solitary dwellers within our school districts. While music and visual art are usually found in every building of a district, drama/theatre remains a sporadic specialty. Even though there are now state standards in theatre, with benchmarks and indicators of theatre knowledge that every student should achieve at levels K - 12, there is no state funding to implement them.

To be together for these meetings, with time spent in intensive focus on what we do and how we can do it better, is invaluable. We are learning how to look at our work with the eyes of a researcher in order to solve specific problems and/or to refine methodologies or prove long-held assumptions.

Today's work was all about our individual inquiries. We took our guiding questions and asked more questions of the question. Others also asked questions as we worked in small groups to sharpen our focus while expanding upon the initial inquiry. Multiple perspectives and points of view came into play as a result of the small group work.

Personally, I felt very glad that I had changed my initial inquiry from a general nebulous concept to one that is very concrete. The climax of the day for me was the moments when the other in my group began asking questions and one said, "Why are you doing this? What is so important about voice training?"

I talked about wanting to help non-drama students develop their projection and articulation. But it was Mary who put it best. She said, we must develop our voices to initiate change. (I couldn't help but think of Barack Obama when she said that!) She is right, without the ability to speak clearly and reach others, we will never be able to articulate ideas that can reach others.

Tomorrow, we are practicing presenting our findings, as preparation for the final meeting in May.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Actions - sounds - words!

We started today by working in the space, moving to various words:

Big, small, bumpy, smooth, stupendous (had to define that one for them), super-heroic, etc.

They were to find actions to express the adjectives. No sound.

The second time through, we did the same sounds and actions and they could add sound effects.

Third time through, they did the actions to the words and sounded the words at the same time: Biiiigggg! BIG! I encouraged them to play with the sound of the word as they explored their actions, explore the sound as well.

Next, in pairs, they conversed with oppositional words. One is Big, the other is Small. Back and forth playing with the sounds and actions, conversing, responding.

Finally, in the same pairs, they were instructed to each pick a word from their poem and use that to converse with, playing with sounds and actions. That took about 15 minutes. For the next 15 minutes, they went back into rehearsal of their poems with their partners, with the instruction to apply what they'd learned to their poems.

We looked at several examples during the final ten minutes of class.

Confidence is deepening. Projection is improving. Not everyone managed to enhance more than one or two words, so I asked them to underline words they thought might work in their poems for homework.

Next week, we will get into some articulation work.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Tuesday's work -- the warm-up

I took them through the warm-up I use with my drama students and play casts. It starts with the spine and then works all the joints from neck to toes. I was careful to include breathing and sounds with the warm-up, before going on to the breathing exercises. We worked on breath awareness and resonating sounds from various points of the body. The sounds were timid at first, but gradually the volume in the room began to pick up as they discovered how to power their voices.

After the warm-up, I sent them off into their pairs again, this time giving them two additional tasks.

1. They could change their actions if their poem called for it. Both could act and both could speak-- it was their task to figure out how to distribute things best for the poem.

2. They were to try finding different ways to resonate their words based upon the warm-up work.

At the end of the class, I asked for volunteers to share their work. It was quite exciting to see and hear the improvements. All of them found a way to enhance the sounds of words within their poems by using resonance. They also developed their actions much further and added sound effects in some cases.

On Thursday, I will begin with some articulation exercises. There are a number of students in this class who mush their speech or tumble the words out too fast.

This week in voice traning

Back at it, after a week that was disrupted by illness and bad weather.

On Monday, we charged back into the poems. We spent a good deal of time working in the space, playing with physical responses to words and phrases. The class was ready to let go physically and had a good time with the warm up. I was preparing them for the main work of the day, which was to respond physically to the words and images of their poems.

I paired them up, somewhat randomly. I did choose to pair the drama students with each other. There are pros and cons to this tactic. Paired with non-drama students I have found that sometimes they can provide positive modeling of good speech and help their partners liberate their physical actions. On the other hand, they can be intimidating to partners who are shy. In the interests of this experiment, which I want to share with teachers in other schools without drama programs, I'm more interested in seeing how students without drama training respond to the physical action approach to voice training.

After the students were paired up, I instructed them that they would take turns voicing their poems while their partner provided suitable actions. They spent about 20 minutes working the poems and by the end of the class many of them had their poems memorized as a side effect of working on the actions.

We ended the class by taking a look at a couple of the works in progress. We observed that some of the poems worked well with one voicing and the other "acting" while other poems didn't. Students identified "first person" vs "third person." They also observed a few vocal problems such as projection and speaking too fast. I didn't let these comments become big issues, simply stating that voices are like musical instruments -- the more you practice the more the sound improves. I reassured them that we'd be doing work that would help everybody develop stronger and more effective voices and left it at that, choosing to comment more on the physical interpretations, which were uniformly clever and fun. Shel Silverstein has that effect!

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Losing my own voice

Lesson plans have been interrupted as I came down with a nasty voice-debilitating bug.

I expect to be back at it tomorrow.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Putting the word in your body

Last Friday, we did a traditional Friday at the Improv session. I taught them What are you doing? A game that frustrates, but keeps them involved whether they are on stage or observing.

This week, I'm starting with movement and using words from their individual poems. We will get to the group poems at some point this week.

We started today with the basic Balancing the Space exercise, one of the greatest gifts given to me by the folks in New World Performance Laboratory.

We move in the space, taking care to keep it balanced. Actors must stay constantly aware in order to move into the next available empty space. As each actor moves, another empty space opens up. Vision and hearing become heightened as one works to achieve the balance.

Then we move into responding to words in oppositional pairs: Crooked vs Straight; Slow vs Fast, Wide vs Narrow, Low vs Tall and so on. After exploring the extremes, we find the steps from slowest to fastest or most crooked to straightest, using a scale of numbers from one to ten make the adjustments.

Next I asked them to find one word from their individual poems, and create a walk movement pattern that fits the word. They all balance the space, working their words. We then play follow the leader, taking turns to reveal the individual word patterns and allow everybody to try them on for size.

Each student then shows her/his individual movement before the class and we try to guess the word. After all the words are revealed, we finally bring sound into the space by playing Word Tennis. In pairs, they toss one of the words back and forth, using their movement pattern to "toss" the word to their partner. For example, the actor with "backward" as a word, propels it with a flick of her hip with back to partner. The actors are exploring sound shapes and velocities without prompting. It comes out of the word. No one appears shy or scared. Projection happens without prompting.

This was a good class today!

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Cold readings

All went as planned today with the cold readings of Shel Silverstein poems. I videotaped them and had time to have write in their journals:

Name one thing you like about your voice.

What would you like to work on in improving your voice?

Tomorrow, we will try a group poem. I will record that and then not do any recording for a couple of weeks while running them through some physical/vocal work and games.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Performing poetry

I'm counting on Shel Silverstein's poetry to make tomorrow fun for the kids, while I put them through the torture of cold readings. In order to get a baseline starting point for voice work, I will give them each a different short Silverstein poem to read on stage before the rest of the class and the digital camcorder.

I'd like to get through the class twice. The first time, I hand them the poem as they go up to the stage. The second time, they will have had the poem in hand for the duration of the class, so we will see if going over it in the mind leads to improvement.

I picked some slightly longer/more difficult poems to give to the 7 drama students in this class. The way they approach their poems may very well provide modeling for the rest of the class -- we shall see what happens.

On Friday, we'll do the same thing with a group poem, recording the first read through, then work it for the period and record it after one session. Eventually, the students will be working out actions to their solo poems and the group poems with a goal of performing them before the entire school during our morning auditorium time.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Day One in Exploratory Drama

The class arrived and I did my traditional first day activities, which begin with guided tours of the Little Theatre. I let my drama students take the other kids round and about, sharing rules and procedures and memories as they act as tourist guides. In this particular exploratory class, there are 7 drama students. The rest are a mixture of dance, visual art, vocal and instrumental music.

After the tours, I kept them in the same groupings and appointed the drama students as talk show hosts. They were to come up with a series of questions to interview the rest of their group members. The interviewees are not to act a role, but to be themselves and answer questions that give me more of an idea who they are.

Questions included: What is your art area? What school did you come from before ours? What's your favorite color/food/music? And so on.

I videotaped the interviews to get an initial "sounding" from each student. The vocal skills on display today ranged from strong to weak and everything in between.

On Thursday and Friday, I'm going to record them doing cold readings of some enjoyable poetry -- probably Shel Silverstein. This will be their base line recording to compare their work to at the end of the 9 weeks.

In 4/5 and 6 drama classes today, I experimented with some vocal/movement exercises that I will use down the line with this exploratory class.

One exercise involved moving in the space, adapting and changing physically to a given word or phrase such as: grumpy, afraid, disgusted, exhilerated, bored and so on. Then after they were warmed up with that exercise I added in make a sound along with your movement that is inspired by the word. After they worked through several words, I had them play my Take it to Another game, in which the group is spaced throughout the working space. One student begins it by moving across the space toward another actor while doing a movement and sound pattern. They must continue the sound/movement until facing another actor and making eye contact. The receiving actor must stay in neutral mode -- no laughing or breaking up. The receiving actor upon making eye contact, takes off with her sound/movement until face to face with a new receiving actor and so on until the entire group has had an opportunity to move.

The benefit of this exercise is that the instructor and students get to focus on each individual and observe how they carry out the exercise. One can see immediately who is eye contact shy and who is having difficulty staying in neutral mode. Also one can learn a great deal from the quality of the sounds and the movements. Some are very stiff or timid. Others give evidence of a sense of rhythm and timing, while some display fluidity and creativity.

Today it was interesting to notice how the sound worked with the movement. Some were thoroughly integrated while in others the sound and movement seemed to be working against each other. I will be looking to see how this exercise changes over the course of the technique work we will be getting in to later on.

In my 6th class, this work is leading into gibberish games, while in 4/5 it is preparing them for puppetry. Puppetry is great for stimulating creative voice work.

Monday, January 21, 2008

New Semester

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the second semester, and I have a brand new exploratory drama class to work with for 9 weeks.

My plan is to review the process I have been developing in the first semester. I am going to zero in on process that involves physical actions and voice training. I will be trying to keep it do-able in a regular classroom setting and flexible enough to fit within any academic subject area.

I will assess the new group by recording them reading from a text -- solo and as a group before beginning any theatre work with them.

At the end of the nine weeks, I will repeat the recording process to assess for individual and collaborative speaking improvement. In addition, I will be asking the class's homeroom teacher to make note of any improvements she observes within her classroom.

I plan to blog my daily lessons here over the course of this class.

Time out for inspiration

I spent an exhilarating weekend out of town, meeting up with two theatre people who have provided inspiration over the years. This gave me an opportunity to discuss my critical links ideas for improving voice training with my trusted former colleagues and collaborators.

My actor friend told me of a fellow in his company who had a voice that was lacking in flexibility, but was able to pass the audition without the director being able to identify the problem ahead of time. Speculation is that the actor had major coaching for his audition piece, but once cast did not have a clue how to speak the Shakespearean character he was assigned to play.

The actor's problem was that he was trapped within his own voice/dialect. His bad speech habits infected his acting to the point that every role would sound the same, and not a pleasant sound as I heard it described. Yet, this actor had been able to take on another voice for one audition. This situation is fascinating, as it is taking place on a professional level. Certainly one sees/hears this sort of thing at the amateur level quite a bit. It becomes a great challenge to correct habitual speech patterns. The younger the actor, the more chance you have of making it a total change from poor to quality speech.

I also spent time with my friend Terry, who is a fellow theatre educator, now teaching in a high school in the state of NY. We spent some quality hours sharing ideas, experiences, lows and highs of theatre teaching. His energy and talent have inspired me from the first time we ever sat down to talk theatre a few short years ago. We are on the same wave length in terms of theatre theory and practice and it is always a joy to brain storm with him.

I advocated that he join the Educational Theatre Association, as it can only enhance his program. He's only been at this school for a year and a half and has had a whole lot to put together in a short time, but I'm sure he will find EdTA and the International Thespian Society will provide resources and experiences that he will find invaluable.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Physical voice training

It seems to me that many people are detached from their voices. They open their mouths, sounds come out, but they have little awareness of how much they could do to enhance the quality.

I've been having students put their hands on their faces to feel the muscles working.

My mime and mask movement teacher, Leonard Pitt, always had us make sounds when we worked on our actions. There are some movements I cannot do without summoning the sounds we used to make in his class. I've found that my students are now similarly infected! I need to explore the sound/action connections with more depth and attentiveness. Certainly, the sounds enhance the respiration and strengthen lung power.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Voices from fall

So what actually went down in the fall semester? No grandiose experiments to bring about instant mindfulness. The school theme for the year is "Voices." For me, that meant work on vocal technique -- especially in 4/5 drama and the 4 - 6 exploratory classes. The younger the student, the more chance there is of making a lasting contribution to voice and communication skills.

In fifth grade, each 9 week class ended with a morning performance of some kind of group poem with actions. To simply stand still and recite did not appeal, nor did I think it would improve student vocal technique.

4/5 worked with Edward Lear poetry. The whole class worked on The Jumblies, and each individual student was given two Lear limericks to perform solo vocally, but with a partner to provide actions to the speaker's words. Separating voice and action was a useful exercise in that the young actors got to test individual skills yet be with a partner within the performance. Not nearly so scary, which is a boost for collaboration skill training as well.

For me, as teacher, I finally got a handle on working with such a large class. 39 students in 4/5 drama makes it difficult to observe each student for a good length of time. Groups of 3 and 4 at the beginning of the year were not as productive as groups of 6 and 7. Or perhaps the early work would have been more difficult no matter what size groups, since more than half of the class is new to the school this year. Regardless, it is getting easier to work with them, but I haven't had time for a notebook check since mid fall, nor have I been giving them notebook assignments. When we worked on the Lear poetry, it was intensive rehearsing for several weeks on end. I need to get some response and reflect time into the routine.

Monday, January 14, 2008

You know your idea is stupid when...

...somebody makes fun of your high-falutin' words on another blog. A blogger was complaining about how she keeps seeing "mindfulness" referred to all over the place and wondered why we don't want to use "pay attention" instead. (Sorry I can't remember which blog this came from.) The question is a good one and worth examining.

Wikipedia gives us a rundown on the term mindfulness. It has a direct connection to the art of acting in its initial definition.
"Mindfulness (Pali: Sati; Sanskrit:smṛti स्मृति ) is a technique in which a person becomes intentionally aware of their thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally..."
Where it gets tricky is in the religious/spiritual connections, and interesting within the psychological realm. Yet, what I really want to look at is this (from the same entry):
"...mindfulness does not have to be constrained to a formal meditation session. Mindfulness is an activity that can be done at any time; it does not require sitting, or even focusing on the breath, but rather is done by bringing the mind to focus on what is happening in the present moment, while simply noticing the mind's usual "commentary".
The following is a possible description of what it is to act a role (in performance situations).:
"One can be mindful of the sensations in one's feet while walking, of the sound of the wind in the trees, or the feeling of soapy water while doing dishes."
The big difference is that the actor is being mindful of the sensations and thoughts of another character's mind. It is kind of a super-mindfulness or double mindfulness. Or perhaps it is more like those Russian dolls that nest one within the next. Within the actor, lives a character who also may be playing one or more roles within the circumstances of the performance.

Looking at a performance, we never want to see the actor acting. We want to believe that the character is alive before us, responding to the situation, the environment, and the other characters.

Here are some concrete examples of an actor not succeeding at mindfulness:

1. Breaking character by laughing or apologizing for a mistake.
2. Allowing habitual gestures to creep into a characterization.
3. Blocking another performer.
4. Dropping a prop or tripping over something on stage.
5. Eyes drifting in a direction that does not further the story or inner development.
6. Cutting off someone's line or not picking up cues quickly enough.

Better late than never

As a participant in the Critical Links Theatre project, we were asked to keep a diary of our process. Here I am four weeks before the February meeting, finally putting my mind to the task of looking for the critical links in my teaching process.

To review, last fall, twelve theatre teachers from all over Ohio met in Cincinnati to enter into a heightened engagement with our work in class and on stage. Over the course of a weekend, we participated in a sequence of stimulating exercises that were designed to focus us on our teaching with the goal of coming up with an Inquiry to pursue.

It looks like this:

1. Create a learning community
2. Develop a question for inquiry
3. Create an inquiry plan
4. Collect evidence
5. Share initial findings
6. Organize and weigh evidence
7. Share conclusions from inquiry

At the end of the weekend, I had a question for inquiry. I'm looking at it right now and I think it is completely stupid! It is too broad and too vague. So I'm going to throw all that out and think about my theatre teaching process as we end the first semester this fall and then come up with a more focused inquiry for the next semester.