Drama Club Teacher Stephen Wright
This year drama club had a fun and eventful year! We began the year by learning to play theater games, as well as physical and vocal warm ups. Some of our favorite games of the many we played included Zip-Zap-Zop (or as the students know it, “I Like Pizza”), Zombie Tag, Charades, and Telephone. These games and warm ups created a presence of mind and body upon which students were able to further cultivate their dramatic skills through other exercises.
Many of our early lessons were focused on exercises designed to develop these skills. We practiced walking along a grid as though we were various animals. In another exercise, mirrored each other’s movements in paired practice to develop a sense of connection between each other. We learned about improv techniques, the areas of the stage, and theatrical terminology. We practiced simple scenes, discussed and story structure and fairy tales, and learned about the various elements of drama including setting, plot, and character. All of these experiences allowed us to further explore the ideas of relationships and conflict within drama, or how characters relate to each other, and how what each one wants and pursues can go against what the other wants and pursues.
One of the most fun dramatic exercises involved creating stage pictures. In this exercise, students in a group looked at various pictures (such as group of people cooking, doing yoga, or playing instruments), and mimicked the people in the pictures as best as possible. We then expanded this exercise by having students move between pictures of people in different positions, copying different pictures, in sequence, in a short amount of time, to demonstrate and experience how performers on stage move between various “stage pictures” to create memorable stories.
We staged two productions in Drama Club this year. The first was The Adventure of Strawberry Girl. In this story, the Strawberry Princess sends her pet rabbits to get her a bubble tea, and her rabbits are kidnapped by monsters working for Coco the Cowboy Dragon. With the help of one rabbit who escaped, she goes on an adventure to rescue them. This play was presented as a reader’s theater production, or staged reading.
In The Elephants Wonder and the Big Bad Train, the Big Bad Train comes to eat Butter City, after already having eaten Corn City and Caramel City. Nathaniel and Alicia, the twin elephant wonders, must retrieve lightning and thunder from the sky and under the sea in order to stop the train from eating their city. This play was presented as a full production.
The characters and settings of the play were brainstormed by students, who drew pictures of characters and described them in English. Afterward, the teacher wrote scripts based on the characters and settings generated by the students. Students discussed the story to provide input on the writing process along the way. In these ways, the students and teacher collaborated a “build a play” from the ground up: writing to production.
As fun as it is, theater is hard work. It requires writing scripts, learning lines, practicing acting skills, understanding storytelling, procuring or creating costumes and sets, practicing timing, and exercising patience and collaboration at a great scale, and usually necessitates many hours of rehearsal to put a play together. Our students have worked very hard this year, even meeting after lunch for extra rehearsal time! They should be proud of their work. Hopefully, they will continue to be involved in theater for a long time.
On a final note, the club is grateful to Ms. Nydia, Ms. Toris, Ms. Angela, Mr. Jason, Mr. Jonathan, and Ms. Jerrica for their advice and input, help with running sound, creating props, running parts of rehearsals, and providing a high level of support. Our club could not have accomplished what it has without their efforts.
If you are interested in reading the scripts your student performed this year, you can access them at the QR codes below!
