Drama Picture Stimulus

[Karren Bangura]

Todaywe experientially learnt some techniques for using drama in a primary classroom. I have attached the text that we used in class (below) but these are activities that could be easily adapted to cover content from other key learning areas such as English and HSIE. The following tasks that we explored could be carried out across 6-8 sessions of between 30-45 minutes each (over several weeks).

Using the story as stimulus, each group creates a map of an imaginary town from the story, planning out geographical features. Here you can focus on how power relations play out in the town, why the town is designed the way it is and what dark secret the town is hiding that explains the tension within the story. Each group explains their version of the town to the wider class.

Using one town to focus on, students move around the room and think up an imaginary character from the town, considering their emotions, their stance and movement and their perspective. Each student stops to talk to another local from the town. This activity can be drawn out, getting students interacting in roles to represent their character. You can manipulate the script each time, encouraging a new piece of gossip and emphasising that each character should have a strong reaction to the tension of the story and explore that in their conversations.

This can be an extended lesson, exploring the viewpoints of different town folk. One student at a time sits in the Hot Seat and the class and teacher ask them questions, giving them a space to explore their character and developing the story further.

This is obviously safe. Soundscapes online work best with smaller groups as the sound quality deteriorates with more speakers. However you can ask participants to demonstrate their sound ideas individually before they make them together. Students could also work in breakout rooms. Give each group a slightly different task so that when they return, they can share what they have done with the rest of the class. For example, with the theme of a jungle, each group could make the sound of a different part of the jungle. Or if you are using a picture as a stimulus, each group could work on a different part of the picture.

Here is another soundscape, this time from a course on teaching Shakespeare. I took a speech by Caliban (from The Tempest) which talks about strange and magical sounds and asked the group to come up with sounds to put behind the speech. I also got them to echo words from the speech and then we improvised this soundscape. See what you think.

Being an achievement assistant in a drama class can be a daunting and unfamiliar thing. The unstructured nature of the room and the high energy levels of the lesson can often feel at odds with the rest of the school. The reality is that within that veneer of confusion there is actually a strict structure and boundaries that are followed.

The start of the lesson is about discussion and having ideas. Often students need the most support here, they might need the stimulus or question broken down for them some more or explained to them in a different way. They might need you to give them one or two ideas to help them begin to form ideas of their own. They also might need to your to explain to them the ideas of other people and how to add ideas to it.

You also might need to help the students with understanding the specific key terms of the lesson such as Still Images, Eye Contact or Naturalism. There is no specific necessity that you know what those key terms or concepts beforehand as the teacher will take you through them with the class. However, being able to break down the understanding of the term or concept for the student would help them understand it.

There are of course some behavioural issues that might need to be dealt with during this phase of the lesson. For much of this phase the students are working independently and some may find this a struggle. They may need to activity breaking down into smaller deadlines (e.g. do scene 1 by this time or the 2nd still image by this time). Obviously part of our responsibility is to help students manage their own time effectively, but this is an area where students may need the most help with.

Hopefully, this is the point where the miracles happen and you see the impact of your work! The vulnerable and shy student speaking in public or the difficult to manage student perform with commitment and purpose. Hopefully.

An important part of the process of drama is also the evaluation of the students own work and the work of others. Most of the time we will build into the lesson a short period of small group discussion before sharing our evaluations with the rest of the class. This is a time for you to support your student by giving them some feedback on their performance, helping them to form some self-criticism and using the key terminology of the lesson to evaluate the performances of others.

In a drama, stimuli are resources that are used to establish the context, focus and purpose of the dramatic topic being presented. Materials used as stimuli can be visual or aural in nature and can represent various genres and forms of either Western theater or theater traditions from other cultures. Different forms of stimuli include music, moving images and film clips, as well as various forms of literature.

Stimulus materials are used during tests and lessons for students of drama. Resources for stimulus materials could be recorded clips of movies or theatrical plays. These clips are then used for analytical assessment. Other materials that can be used for this purpose include dramatic texts or dramatic readings.

There are a wide range of stimuliclosestimuliIn drama, stimuli refer to the drama texts, videos and photos, etc available to work with. to choose from, from which a devisedclosedevisedCreating and developing a performance together as a group. work can be created. These include:

It is important to allow a limited time frame to discuss responses to the starting pointclosestarting pointThe initial idea, word or object that is given at the beginning of the devising process. or stimulus. Ask:

At the very beginning of the devising, things will not be perfect. Remember the bigger picture and be positive, knowing that details can be fine-tuned later on. Groups that are always evolving and experimenting with their ideas can experience more success with their work.

I feel good. Today and yesterday felt like the first couple of days when I didn't have to work on anything. I didn't have to do much of anything at all. So, that was actually very nice because it's been a long time, I suppose. I have been working on so many deadlines.

I felt like an animal let out of the cage. I've been incredibly disciplined throughout the pandemic. I cannot articulate how sick I got after my second vaccination shot. It did two things for me. One, it made me very sick for 36 hours, which people told me it would. Two, it made me thankful that I strictly quarantined because I couldn't have taken two weeks or more of that illness.

This is important to remember, and it's important to put this into words right now when the work is about to be seen, finally. My feeling when I was invited out to have lunch with you, Nu, and with you, Michael, was very warm. I was very excited, and I felt a lot of understanding and gratitude. And that made me feel really, very nice. And it did not take very long for that nice feeling to fade because it was immediately followed by global chaos or uncertainty and then also imminent threat. That became very confusing very quickly. However, the warmness of your invitation did not completely disappear in the midst of that.

Then I was wondering, what other characters would it make sense to expand and bring into the costume party, the orgy at sea? Who else should be there? Making this show often felt very confusing and awful. And very sympathetic, I hope.

Well, I will say that you could not have conceptualized the project any better. For me, it has been an extraordinary experience because I spent my working years on moving images, and then I spent so much of the rest of my life looking at still images by painters. This project is analogous to being involved with filmmakers who would get impressions in their brain, and I never knew what would be spit back up on the screen. But the thing that moved me the most was not anything singular, but a combination of things that surprised me.

Number one, I had never witnessed someone referencing and transforming the medium I worked in, the popular medium of moving pictures, into a single image. Two, your interpretations are so vividly full of emotion. Three, the subjects are caught always in the appropriate moment. I bet if I put the directors of these films into a room with you and asked them to select some of their most important shots, you'd both be aligned on a good number of the scenes that were chosen.

The paintings are brilliantly painted, and the colors are hyper-real. The mix between figuration and abstraction at moments is extraordinary. Their blurring of time is fascinating. The paintings stand to me as both a moment in time, but also moving pictures. They're not just single frames - they remind the viewer of what happened before this scene, what happened during this scene and what happened after this scene. In other words, your still image evokes a memory that unfolds like a condensed movie. I find that to be quite special. You basically painted pictures of and about moving pictures that were still pictures that then, in turn, became movie snippets again. To me, they all resonate on a very different level, so I couldn't be happier with the group.

This will be quick because I want to hear what you have to say next, but it occurs to me right now that I have you, literally you, to thank for a lot of the material I've been using to find the pictures that I want to make. I know that it wasn't ALL you, but it was a lot of you that went into making these things accessible to a person like me when I was younger. And I appreciate what you've done.

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