Theater Arts and Imaginative Play

For those of you who have followed enough to know I'm teaching at the co-op this semester, I had my theater class.  They're good kids, and there's some serious talent there.  Of course, I'm also learning the hard way that dealing with kids and acting, they can be a handful.  It's not always easy to think of ways to get them to pull it in a bit.  It's also hard to get them out of their imaginative play zone and into the zone of acting.  I think in some ways I really have my work cut out for me!  That's not a bad thing.  I'm not an incredibly experienced drama teacher and most of the kids I've worked with before have some theater experience, even if it is just putting on plays in their living room.

Over the past few years I've noticed that kids play a lot differently than I did when I was younger, and I think that has a lot to do with the results I've seen in my theater class.  I was always kind of weirded out by these trends, though I'd never thought it might be my background (no matter how brief) in theater that might have something to do with it.  My sister and I have been putting on plays since we were old enough to come up with the idea of acting out our own versions of movies.  I did some acting in school too.  Even so, the way these kids play is nothing like the way these kids play now.

It was a couple of years ago when I noticed a huge trend in kids and their play that just seemed awkward.  Kids would tell each other, "and then you did this" and the other kid would immediately respond, almost as though one kid were story telling the whole play session.  Another common one is, "and then I started doing this."  I remember when I was little I never did things like that.  I never told other people how to react to the things I did in play.  I never explained my actions either.  The only things I ever said were to describe the props and the set we were using.  "Hey, look at this!  We've just stumbled upon a labyrinth!"  In reality it would just be the bushes in our front yard.  I would declare that a stick was my sword and other things of that nature.  Often times other "characters" in our play would come up to me and say, "Hey, what are you doing?" if they didn't get what I was acting out, but most of the time it was pretty obvious.  I'd never realized it before, but our play was full of pantomime.

That's actually one of the biggest problems I'm having with my theater class.  They don't seem comfortable with the idea of just sinking in to the roll and acting it out.  More often than not they feel compelled to narrate everything they're doing instead of just doing it.  They're not comfortable with the idea of pantomime.  It's awkward and uncomfortable in a way I never imagined.  I always thought acting things out would be the most natural thing in the world for kids with active imaginations.  Simply acting things out seemed the most natural way to play.

I don't think this new form of play is good or bad.  It's just what it is.  All it means is I've got a lot of work ahead of me in order to get these kids thinking the way actors really think.  I might have to get creative on coming up with ways to encourage the kids to act things out, not tell us what they're doing.  It's not going to be easy either.  Some of these older kids have been playing the way they've been playing for years and it's hard to go and change that routine.  I've got to realize that I'm not just trying to teach these kids a new skill, I'm trying to re-engineer the whole way they play.  That means I've got a lot to think about in activities to get these kids to have a new perspective of the way they interact in an on-stage kind of setting.

It's given me a lot to think about and noticing the problems I'm running into, I think I'm developing a good plan of action for the rest of the year.  I somehow see a lot of pantomime exercises in the future, as well as narration because it's not so easy to listen and do what you're told when you've got all these ideas bursting forth of what should come next.  I'm really excited to watch these kids grow because I'm already looking at a very vivid group of personalities.  I'd like to think I'm as excited about this as the kids are!