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.
Showing posts with label Critical Links in Theatre Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Critical Links in Theatre Education. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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.
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
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