[My
friend and frequent contributor to ROT, Kirk Woodward, is chiming in again with a new
consideration on an aspect of theater.
Drawing on his long experience as a teacher of theater and acting, both
with children and adults, Kirk’s thinking about the popular field of “creative
dramatics.” You’ll read that he (and
especially his late wife, Pat) had reservations about the name for the
activity, but that doesn’t remove its value as an actor-training program, a
resource for directors and actors in rehearsal, and people who aren’t
necessarily performers who want a boost to their creative imaginations and
self-confidence.
[I,
too, have had some experience with creative dramatics and theater games (and
you’ll see that Kirk differentiates between these related fields that some
people lump together), as a student, teacher, and director. Kirk mentions, for instance, the Cultural
Enrichment Program in Lexington, Virginia, which is also where I first tried to
teach creative dramatics. (Kirk and I
were classmates at Washington and Lee University, which helped sponsor the
program.) My contact with the field isn’t
nearly as extensive as Kirk’s has been, but I recognize most of the lessons he
learned because I learned them, too.]
One
of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of theater, in my experience, is
the field known as “creative dramatics.” There’s a related term, “theater
games,” and the two are often used interchangeably, for good reason – both creative
dramatics and theater games are performance games, more like charades than they
are like, say, Trivial Pursuit. Both
involve performance-related exercises – basically, games of physical (and vocal)
expression that encourage creativity. (I’ll give some examples as we go on).
Still,
I haven’t yet found a definition I like for “creative dramatics,” because it
would have to also include a good definition of “drama.” But I see “creative dramatics” as the wider
term, and “theater games” as a subset of it. In this piece I will use the terms
as though they are two separate things, although obviously they are closely
related.
“Theater
games,” in the way I’m using the terms, then, as the name suggests, have some
sort of performance in mind. The performance may come directly out of the games
themselves – this is how the 1970 Broadway show Paul Sills’ Story Theatre was developed. Or the games may help in
the production of some more formal play.
A
director, for example, may use “theater games” to get particular results out of
the actors in a play, or an acting class may use the same or different games to
help develop more general acting skills. I have used theater games in
productions, but much of my experience in creative dramatics has aimed at encouraging
personal growth, not particularly at building actors.
On
the other hand, creative dramatics work need never lead to a production at all;
it may be devoted entirely to building the confidence and encouraging the
creativity of the participants, and it may more specifically be used as
psychological therapy. So we have, really, three strains running alongside each
other, sometimes crossing, sometimes merging:
- Creative dramatics for therapy
- Creative dramatics for personal enrichment
- Theater games for theatrical production
These
are not hard and fast distinctions, and people use the terms differently. At
the end of this piece, in fact, I’ll give an example of what I’d call creative
dramatics that nevertheless morphs into a kind of performance. And is “personal
enrichment” so different from therapy? “Therapy is growth,” a therapist once
told me, and many beneficial activities can say the same – but are they all
therapy? It’s easy but pointless to get too caught up in definitions, and if
something is defined too broadly, it’s probably not defined at all. So I’ll
continue to use the three terms as though they stand for different things.
Of
the three, I’ve had the least to do – nothing, really – with creative dramatics
for therapy, at least in the medical sense, and I’ll have the least to say
about it here. Sally Baily, a drama therapist and a professor at Kansas State
University, summarizes what is known of the history of the field, and along the
way demonstrates the difficulty of fully documenting history, in an article
called “Ancient and Modern Roots of Drama Therapy” (31 December 2009):
She
may – or may not – stretch Aristotle’s point a bit in claiming that his theory
of catharsis is a form of drama therapy. I was thrilled to read about “Soranus,
a second century Roman, [who] believed that the way to cure mentally ill
patients was to put them into peaceful surroundings and have them read,
discuss, and participate in the production of plays in order to create order in
their thinking and offset their depression.” I wonder if by any chance those
plays she refers to were improvised. However, I haven’t been able to learn any
more about him except that he was apparently from Ephesus, and a gynecologist.
I
am convinced of at least one fact about creative dramatics as therapy: it’s no
field for amateurs. This point may seem self-evident, but it not only isn’t, it
may not even be the usual approach. I have been a member of many creative
dramatics classes where the instructor seemed to feel that the participants had
to be “broken apart and put back together.” One quoted the famous Polish
director and theater leader Jerzy Grotowski to the effect that “Americans’
bodies are like haunted houses.”
Who
is qualified to make that judgment? And who is qualified to do something about
it? Perhaps in, say, the 1960s, some might have accepted the idea of a guru
wise enough to be able to mold human beings into new creatures. It was always a
bad idea; now it seems a dangerous one. The guy leading the acting class down
the street is unlikely to be a good source of advice, much less a person one
could trust with the control of one’s deepest nature.
On
the other hand, the drama critic Eric Bentley, in his essay “Theatre and
Therapy” in Thinking About The Playwright
(1987), describes in detail the techniques of Dr. Jacob Levy Moreno, known as the founder
of the field of psychodrama, and gives an idea of the possibilities of therapy
in that area when applied by a properly trained and credentialed practitioner.
My
own experience with creative dramatics is a little less, well, dramatic, but may
provide some lessons. I got a rocky start. I began working with it at Washington
and Lee University, where the teacher, Lee Kahn, used some “theater games” as
part of the acting class. I enjoyed them, but found them difficult – I felt
they were too abrupt somehow: they demanded results without making it clear how
to get to them.
This
feeling seems to have been shared by my wife Pat, who hated all theater work
that wasn’t scripted anyway. She told me years after college that she’d taken a
creative dramatics class, found to her horror “that it involved games,” and
was disappointed that it didn’t seem to mean making your acting more creative. “I thought all drama is supposed to be
creative,” she said, and it’s hard to argue with that.
The
first time I tried to teach creative dramatics was for the Cultural Enrichment
Program of Rockbridge County, Virginia, in 1969. Lee’s wife, Betty, recruited
me to do it, heaven knows why. I certainly had no idea what I was doing. Betty
and her team wrote out the lesson plans, and I still have them. They begin with
stretching and loosening up, move on to physical improvisations using the
imagination (standing on sand that becomes hot, running through water, running
through mud), sensory awareness (what do you hear? what do you smell?), toss an
imaginary balloon . . . . These exercises are augmented by standards like the
Mirror Exercise (one person “mirrors” the movements of another – a classic),
the Freeze Game (sudden “freezes” of movement lead to new situations for
improvisations). Eventually the classes move on to staging simple stories. These
are perfectly sensible exercises; my problem with them, I think, was that their
order seemed arbitrary – I didn’t see the principle behind it.
Then
as part of the work of a children’s theater on the Army post at Fort Lee, Virginia,
I taught some sessions with an Army wife named Jeanne Pollard, who was a
first-rate theater person and really knew her stuff. I must have taught half a
dozen or so classes. However, I was aware that I didn’t have the “first
principles” of the approach in hand. My approach, as far as I can tell from the
extant lesson plans, was scattershot – no framework or structure to it, just
one exercise after another, whatever came to mind.
The
same was true when I taught a creative dramatics session for the Recreation
Activities class at Teachers College (Columbia University) in October 1975. I
gave a sleepy Saturday-morning class a tour through how to use exercises for
teaching, and I guess I got some points across, but I didn’t feel that I’d
mastered the subject.
Somewhere
around this time I became aware of the most famous book on the field, Improvisation for the Theatre (1963) by
Viola Spolin (“Originator of THEATRE GAMES”). Spolin was greatly influenced by
the work of Neva L. Boyd, with whom she studied in Chicago. Spolin writes in
the introduction to her book:
I received from her an extraordinary training
in the use of games, story-telling, folk dance, and dramatics as tools for
stimulating creative expression in both children and adults, through
self-discovery and personal experiencing.
Spolin’s
book is extensive and methodical, and by the end of it the reader feels able to
do practically anything in the field. The advice on “side-coaching,” in effect
guiding the improvisation while it’s going on, is outstanding. Spolin groups
the exercises according to purpose, and for each exercise describes its steps,
presents ideas for class evaluation, and gives extensive notes.
I
suspect that everyone who works in the field has Spolin in mind as a permanent
reference point, even people who want to promote different approaches. For my
part, I admired her book enormously, but I couldn’t really make it work for me
as a technique, for reasons I’ll describe in a moment.
The
next challenge for me as a creative dramatics instructor was the Senior
Citizens Drama Project of 1975, which morphed into a job for the New York City
Housing Authority, also doing creative dramatics for senior citizens, in
1975-76. It was a mixed success. In some locations I never got any drama
activity started at all. If I had known what I was to learn in four to five
years, the whole thing would have been completely different. But at least I
brought some people together, and I didn’t do any harm.
I
then taught a class in Harlem and one in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of
Brooklyn; I don’t remember if the funding ran out on the city work, or if I got
tired of it, or if it got tired of me. In any case, something great was about
to happen. In 1980 I auditioned as a substitute for Pushcart Players, a fine
touring children’s theater company out of Verona, New Jersey. It was successfully
run, and still is, by Ruth Fost, and working with the theater at that time on
creative dramatics was a very competent professional named Gretchen Johnson.
I
toured for a year for Pushcart as “swing” (substitute) actor and pianist – I did
dozens of shows for them. That was one of the best theatrical experiences of my
life, because it taught me consistency and self-reliance. After that I was
never apprehensive about being cast for a show; I knew I had resources to draw
on. The cast was fun, too, a lovely group of people. We traveled all over the
state of New Jersey; it was a lot of work, including putting up and taking
down the set, and at least once we did four shows in a day. But with an
experience like that, you find out what you can do.
But
best of all, the Pushcart people were enthusiastic about an approach to
creative dramatics they’d learned from an Englishman named Brian Way, equal
parts educator and theater worker, who founded
Theatre Centre in London, an organization going strong to this day, which
describes itself as
a professional theatre company touring to children and young people. A registered charity, since 1953 Theatre Centre has been taking outstanding new writing to schools to benefit children’s education and aspirations, and to enhance their knowledge and imaginations. We work closely with artists, young people and teachers, to ensure we consistently create high-quality, life-enhancing theatre experiences for young audiences.
Way
wrote a book that has had an enormous influence on me and on many others. It’s
called Development Through Drama,
and its basic principle is: no
“performing” – everyone works together.
That
turned out to be the magic key for me. Viola Spolin’s famous exercises begin
with people standing on stage and being stared at. Brian Way didn’t want anyone
to be stared at. He wanted the participants to feel safe and free to work. He
felt that the work should be its own critique – that the class process itself
should produce the desired results.
Armed
with some training from the Pushcart staff in Brian Way’s approach, I began
teaching creative dramatics with them, and soon I was going out to schools by
myself to lead full days of classes for Pushcart. I still use the material I
learned then, with continuing modifications, of course, but the basic approach
is so good that I consider it completely reliable. And the fundamental
principle – that everyone works at the same time – is pure gold.
After
Pushcart I taught some classes for my friend Mona Hennessey, who was teaching
drama at a school in Jersey City at one time. I taught for a year at a theater
school in Hackensack, New Jersey, then joined the staff of the Performers
Theater Workshop, run by Howard and Esther Kravitz, in Livingston, New Jersey, and
taught there on Saturdays for years. Howard was formerly a big band musician,
and Esther a Las Vegas performer, but they both had a lot of respect for the
creative dramatics program.
I
also led creative dramatics sessions in Montclair, New Jersey, for birthday
parties under the heading “Creative Birthdays.” And I’ve used creative
dramatics techniques in many other situations, directing being not the least of
them. It’s a wonderful field and I’m so glad I finally got a handle on how to
do it.
So
what’s the point of creative dramatics, really? The three goals that stand out
for me are creativity, confidence, and competence, more or less in that order.
Creativity – the basis of
creative dramatics work is the assurance that everyone has not just an
imagination, but a good one; that while social pressures in particular may
discourage us from using our imaginations, they are retrievable; that the
imagination gets stronger with practice – a point that the work is designed to
reinforce quickly; and that one person’s imagination is as good as another’s.
We will certainly have different results when we use our imaginations, but
there’s no rating system – each person’s is just fine.
How
do you deal with participants who adamantly refuse to imagine anything at all?
That’s the strength of everyone’s working together. On the one hand, the
reluctant members of the class aren’t singled out. On the other hand, the fact
that other people are picturing and saying increasingly wild things provides
comfort and reassurance. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a situation where
someone simply refused to do the imaginative work at all.
Needless
to say, the leader’s response to everyone’s contributions is always strongly
positive, since no idea can be “wrong,” and this strategy leads to . . .
Confidence – or at least it
should. “Confidence” means “self-confidence,” of course, but it also means
confidence in the process – the security that while the group is working, you
will be respected and not put in a bad light or forced to do things you don’t
want to do. The result ought to be, and very frequently is, an increase in
positive feelings about one’s ability to function alongside other people, and
to handle initially unfamiliar situations.
I’m
sure there are scientific ways of measuring increases in creativity and
confidence, but you don’t need metrics to tell when a group is growing,
individually and collectively. In fact, most of the time the situation is as
simple as this: if the instructor feels that the session is going well, it
probably is, and the reverse is also true.
Competence – I have listed this
goal third in the series for several reasons. One is that creativity and
confidence are sufficient rewards in themselves. There doesn’t have to be any
ulterior motive involved in the process. However, the fact is that people who
enjoy and make progress in creative dramatics also may become increasingly
capable of better work on stage – hence the more specialized field of theater
games. In this sense I think my wife was wrong: creative dramatics can make one’s acting more creative, as
one learns to listen more to the others in the scene, to respond freshly to new
circumstances and events, to get a better idea of how a scene works from
beginning to end, and so on.
So
theatrical competence definitely can
be a by-product of creative dramatics work. But – and here we come to one of
the major benefits of the arts as a whole – the stage is not the only place where
the competence one learns in creative dramatics can be applied. Theater, in its
many forms, including creative dramatics, is a “portable skill” – it involves ancillary
skills such as working with others, organization, punctuality, dealing with
difficult people, giving and receiving instructions, training, finance and
administration, calmness in the face of adversity . . . a person who has a thorough background in
performance has a “toolkit” that can be used in many aspects of life.
Creativity,
confidence, competence – it’s an impressive list, and all three develop more or
less spontaneously out of a good creative dramatics experience. Just what is a “good” creative dramatics
experience, though? In a way, it can be defined circularly – it’s an experience
that increases creativity, confidence, and competence. I’d also add, however,
that it’s an experience that’s appropriate for the teacher, as my own story
demonstrates.
I
taught many approaches to creative dramatics that worked for other people but
didn’t for me. That doesn’t mean that the other approaches were wrong; it means
I didn’t respond to them, and so the groups I led couldn’t respond to them
either, at least not as much as I felt they could. I suspect that almost any
approach to creative dramatics can work, provided the leader believes in it and
has sufficiently thought it through.
I
have a pile of lesson plans for creative dramatics sessions over the years.
Teachers would be appalled at my lesson plans: I scratched them out on any
available paper, often in a sort of creative dramatics shorthand:
Move
around and freeze
Yo-yo
Ad-ons
Relate
an incident – other add detail
Freeze
game
Improv
– current events
Give
me that ball
(I
have no idea what that last one means.)
Some
of my lesson plans are more extensive; some of them are filled with ideas from
various books. Viola Spolin, I believe, advises keeping a good games book
around, so you can turn to it when nothing else seems to be working. There are
countless books on creative dramatics available these days. After a while they
start to look the same, with the same kinds of exercises, but you can often
find good ideas in them – my friend Mona Hennessy and I relied for years on a
little pamphlet that looked like it was just a list of activities, but that
turned out to be extremely useful.
Looking
through my lesson plans – well, notes – I see a number of ideas that sounded
good to me but that I was never able to make much progress with. Sock puppets,
for example, sounded like a terrific approach, but I remember it as a bust for
me and I only tried it once or twice. Especially after I started working at
Performers Theatre Workshop, I tried working out plans for half-year sessions,
and it was better to have the plans than not to, but I seldom if ever stuck to
them through the entire series of classes, because some activities worked – and
I tried to build on them – and some didn’t – and if neither the class nor I
liked them, I dropped them.
While
I was working with Pushcart Players, an excellent creative dramatics teacher
named Karen Fredrickson led a workshop with us, and one of the things I
remember best from it was her advice not to worry about repeating exercises. In
fact, she said, children love repetition. Do what works over and over – just
vary it and let it develop. I wish I had heard this very good advice years
earlier. I was always afraid I’d bore the participants, and so I tried for
constant novelty, which is not a realistic goal.
Pushcart
worked out a general format for creative dramatics classes which I’ve used for
years now, building on the parts of it in subsequent weeks if the class has
multiple sessions. Derived from Brian Way’s practice, it has flexibility, and
isn’t a recipe, but in part it goes something like this:
- Use strange objects to get the imaginations started – “What could this be?” Stress that no answer is wrong – everyone’s creativity is fine.
- Stretch and shake the various parts of the body.
- Build up to shaking everything on the body, and then freeze at a signal. From the freeze position, become different things as coached by the instructor (“something huge,” “something tiny,” “something beautiful”).
- In small groups, in short amounts of time, develop a story out of elements the leader provides (“your story must have a storm, an angry old person, and end with the words, ‘It just goes to show, you can’t mess around with magic’” – Brian Way’s idea)
- Have the groups, working together, form “photos,” still pictures, of moments in their stories, starting and ending at the signal. Repeat this several times, mix the groups up and create new stories, continue with “photos.”)
- Once the “photo” principle (“freeze – ready – put the story into action”) is mastered, move into more elaborate stories, based on the day’s school lesson, a social problem, something in the news, a book, poem, or commercial, or anything else. Or, in one-session classes, a narrated story can be used instead, with the group acting out the story as the narrator tells it.
Generally
speaking, with creative dramatics classes, I begged the schools not to insist
on showcases for parents. If the parents had
to see the children at work, whenever possible I framed the session as a class,
and told the parents that all they would see was the way we worked every week.
Even this approach has its problems, though, because it still turns the class
into performance, and there’s a temptation to show off, for better or worse,
for the parents.
Once
or twice I had to arrange a performance of a creative dramatics class as part
of a year-end show. Those events ranked with the Titanic as disasters. I recall
saying to someone, while one of those dire presentations was going on, “I
swear, if we live through this, I’ll never, never teach again.” I did live
through it, and did teach again, but the scars remain. Any performance by a creative dramatics class will by necessity
dominate class time. The group simply has to get ready for the public. Creative
dramatics, basically, goes out the window, replaced by half-hearted theater
games. One or the other must be the focus – never both.
But
a theater games series is easier to plan than a creative dramatics session,
because it has a specific performance objective as a goal. In effect, planning
creative dramatics means planning from the beginning and going forward, but
planning theater games means planning backwards from the end result, for
example:
GOAL:
Build a group feeling in the cast.
ACTIVITIES:
Warm the cast up by playing different ball games with imaginary balls. Do group
sentence-building and story-building.
GOAL:
Loosen up a scene that seems to be “stuck.”
ACTIVITIES:
Do the scene paraphrasing the lines. Sing the scene, do it in slow-motion or
very fast motion, do it in mime.
GOAL:
Improve projection of voices.
ACTIVITIES:
Improvise a scene related to the circumstances of the play, place the locations
of the scene around the auditorium.
Some
actors don’t like to do anything in rehearsal except work on the script – some loathe theater games or “exercises” – so
the director must work sensitively.
Theater
games can also be used to develop original theatrical material. In the Pushcart
Players creative dramatics outline above, by step 6 the group is positioned to
create new scenes or even plays if desired, over a period of time. Any subject
matter will do for story-building – even science and mathematics.
This
summer I led three one-class workshops as part of a church summer camp, with
classes for (1) preschool and first grade, (2) second through fifth grades, (3)
sixth grade and above. The children basically had inner-city backgrounds; some
of them reported that they had acted in school plays (one said, “I’m an
actor!”). The organizers and I decided that if we kept the event fairly
informal, we could have the groups demonstrate some “still photos brought to
life” of Bible scenes at the end of the event – in other words, in a compressed
way we did creative dramatics that could be said to blend somewhat into theater
games, not something I recommend, but we found a way to do it acceptably.
We
followed the class procedure listed above, leading into easily staged Bible
stories – Noah getting the animals onto the ark, Moses and the parting of the
Red Sea, Jesus calming the storm – with a different Noah, Moses, or Jesus each
time. The groups became, in addition to the human characters, waves, animals,
weather. I narrated – which removed the need for transition scenes – and
“coached” the groups into forming the “still photos” that turned into various
moments of the stories. We could fairly quickly have expanded the stories, but
time was pressing.
I
hadn’t led a creative dramatics session in some time, and had forgotten how
much work it can be. In general I tend to think of my relation with creative
dramatics groups, not as that of teacher to students, but as that of (nervous)
party host to guests. My responsibility, I feel deep inside, is to have the
participants leave in a good mood, nourished and entertained. This may not be
the best attitude to have, but that’s what I bring to the table. However that
may be, the satisfactions of the work are great. Helping to build creativity,
confidence, and competence – not a bad day’s work.
[As
I said at the top, I’ve had some small experience with theater games and creative
dramatics. For example, when I was
rehearsing a stage adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short story Ward
6, I wanted the actors, who were all
playing either patients or staff in the psychiatric ward, to feel that the performance
space was intimately familiar to them—where they literally spent all or most
of their time. I devised some exercises for the cast to explore the
"stage" (a black box). I had the actors do the exploration in
character so that the link between the role and the space became indivisible. Before that, when I was getting my MFA at
Rutgers University, we grad students formed a children's theater one summer.
One of the performances we created was a scripted play (an Aurand Harris
musical), but the other was a story-theater assemblage of tales all involving
animals (like the Brementown Musicians and some James Thurber fables). We
developed the animal-story production by games and improvs, keeping what worked
best and tossing out what didn't or didn't appeal to us. (We also made a
group pilgrimage to the Bronx Zoo to observe some of the animals in our stories.)
[Kirk’s
last post on ROT was
“Eugene Ionesco” on 2 July; he’s contemplating
another contribution to the blog on what he says is “theater etiquette,” though
I don’t know yet what that will turn out to mean! (One of the really fun aspects of seeing
submissions from Kirk is not just what he chooses to look at, his subject, but
what approach he’ll take. So far, he
hasn’t failed to surprise me with his perspective and analysis.)]
No comments:
Post a Comment