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.