What concerns me with studies in drama and theatre, is that like learning a musical instrument, studying the craft of acting can take years of tuition learning the necessary skills. In senior drama classes it is often the subtleties and nuances of a student actor that make the difference between an average performer and a stunning one. These advanced skills, along with more basic performance skills, aren’t learned in the final year of high school … they are taught and carefully nurtured in junior drama classes years before.

Using a high school drama or theatre program as an example, one can create several years of curriculum from the ground up. Here in Melbourne, Australia, I start with a foundation Year 7 Drama course, keeping in mind the wide range of skills in this discipline students possess from various primary feeder schools. The Year 8 Drama curriculum builds on the skills learned in Year 7, with a few more challenges, but nothing extraordinarily difficult or threatening. These two year levels are broad teaching and learning programs, skimming the surface of many topics areas, most covered fairly briefly. Year 9 Drama starts to specialise, because in my school, this is where Drama becomes a non-compulsory elective subject for the first time. Once Year 10 Drama rolls in, as the teacher I am acutely aware of preparing many of my students for senior Drama courses, so the activities and skill sets of my Year 10 pupils must reflect this.

But you can also build six years of Drama curriculum from the top down. Starting with the end results needed in final-year internal and external assessment in Drama, each year below Year 12 can have activities in the program that prepare students for the work in their final year. If a student must perform a monologue for examination assessment in Year 12, then a monologue in a Year 11 course the year before is a “must” and probably in Year 10 as well if you can squeeze it in.

Bu the skills for any form of final year performance assessment in a drama or theatre program at high school should stem from activities in junior drama classes. No student arrives at Year 12 with amazing skills out of nowhere. Every one of my Year 12 Drama students each year have gained their skills many years before, enjoying the fun of junior drama classes, participating in more challenging and specific activities and performances in middle school drama programs in the intermediate years, then striving for success and the refinement of their skills in senior high school drama classes.

Finally, continuity is paramount. Ask any teacher who has a haphazard teaching program in drama, sometimes through no fault of their own, and you’ll hear all about frustration. Wherever possible, schools need to have the availability of some form of drama or theatre program at all levels. Students who study drama at Years 7 and 8, but have no choice to undertake it at Years 9 or 10, but then find it available to them again in Years 11 or 12, suffer from an inconsistency in skills because they have to pick up from one or two years prior with their studies in this discipline.

Whatever the teaching program, over the years I have been left with no doubt about the importance of junior drama in a high school curriculum. My experience has told me a strong junior drama program is essential for success at the senior end of high school and that a good junior drama teacher is gold!

Recently there has been essays on playwright Enda Walsh and Irish theatre, American actress Julianne Moore, the state of the arts in Sydney and New South Wales, 22 year-old English playwright sensation Polly Stenham, the strength of contemporary Russian theatre, the place of arts festivals in Australia and Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco.

This weekend John Bell, the founder of Australia’s national Shakespeare touring company, Bell Shakespeare, is interviewed on the eve of turning 70 and once again tackling the almighty role of King Lear. My personal love for Shakespeare began the day I opened King Lear in Year 11 Literature back at high school. From that day onwards, my interest in theatre accelerated at a rapid pace and even after reading Macbeth, Hamlet and most of the Bard’s other works, nothing in my opinion came close to the power of characterisation and playwriting that exists in Lear.

In fact, one of the reasons Lear is rarely seen these days on the stages of international theatre companies is because many quietly believe it to be “unstageable”. If not the play itself, then certainly the protagonist, Lear, King of Britain. Till the day I die, I will never forget the gaudiness, the campness and the grotesqueness of John Bell’s King Lear in Australia in 1998, directed by Barry Kosky.

Closer to home, Shakespeare is more relevant to me in the classroom. With a new group of Year 10 Drama students, I have placed them head-first into a Shakespearean monologue for their first assessment task at the beginning of the academic year. Their previous experience with Shakespeare has only been Romeo and Juliet last year in English class. Now, I have asked them to dive into the deep end of the pool head-on. Whilst they are definitely engaged (a sigh of relief), of course they are also bewildered, telling me Shakespeare’s use of words is so foreign to them (even after several lessons breaking the monologues into beats, reading plain language interpretations, doing research etc). From the article in Review, mentioned above, I have found my source of inspiration for my students from John Bell, himself:

Shakespeare is easier than anything else in that it’s memorable; the words are very beautiful. when I was young, I loved learning Shakespeare. It’s like learning a song or poem. It’s important to understand exactly what you’re saying, consult not just the footnotes, but dictionaries to get the meaning of the words, where they came from originally and how they differ today. Then it becomes easier. It’s helped by it’s rhythm and metre and rhyme.

I just walk around and around in circles with a book in my hands and repeat it over and over until it gets into my head. It’s growing into the role, like putting on clothes item by item until you’re fully inside it.

(John Bell)  Source: The Weekend Australian, 20-21 February 2010.

What better advice could I give to young students tackling Shakespeare in a Drama class for the first time? Perfect.

Link: Bell Shakespeare Company

This humble little blog began in February 2006 on the Blogger platform. A little over two years later, I moved everything over to WordPress. Along the way, readers have survived my impatience changing the themes (skins) on this blog a bit too often (sorry).

But most importantly, 4 years on we have a dedicated Drama community reading and adding comments to The Drama Teacher on a regular basis. It’s home will always proudly be Melbourne, Australia, but the essence of Drama and Theatre teaching has commonalities the world over, making the content of this blog relevant to us all.

The Drama Teacher is likely to remain a passionate, but part-time interest for me. If I weren’t teaching Drama full-time on weekdays during the academic year, I’d have little to post on this blog, so it all makes sense.

I’ll continue to post about theatre styles, education issues, industry news, acting and more, as often as I can through 2010. I’m interested if there are areas you would like me to cover more often on this blog. Post a comment and let me know.

I won’t forget to regularly post about the joys of our wonderful profession. After all, I’m sure you’d agree Drama teaching is the best job in the world. If I had my time all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Thanks for being a part of The Drama Teacher so far. I look forward to your continued support in the future.

Justin Cash

Here are the recently announced 2010 Oscar nominees for acting. The Oscar ceremony will be held on March 7 and for the first time since 1929 we will have co-hosts on the night. Being entertained by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin for a few hours should produce a few laughs.

Actor in a Leading Role

Jeff Bridges Crazy Heart

George Clooney Up In The Air

Colin Firth A Single Man

Morgan Freeman Invictus

Jeremy Henner The Hurt Locker

Actor in a Supporting Role

Matt Damon Invictus

Woody Harrelson The Messenger

Christopher Plummer The Last Station

Stanley Tucci The Lovely Bones

Christoph Waltz Inglourious Basterds

Actress in a Leading Role

Sandra Bullock The Blind Side

Helen Mirren The Last Station

Carey Mulligan An Education

Gabourey Sidibe Precious

Meryl Streep Julie & Julia

Actress in a Supporting Role

Penelope Cruz Nine

Vera Farmiga Up In The Air

Maggie Gyllenhaal Crazy Heart

Anna Kendrick Up In The Air

Mo’Nique Precious

However, a few days ago I was privileged to be a part of an education experience for Jersey Boys that involved a walk on the set after the show and a Q&A session with the Company Manager, Resident Director, Choreographer and Musical Director.

Did you know?

• Jersey Boys Australia cost AU $10 million to mount in July 2009, on par with the US $8 million Jersey Boys cost to put on Broadway in November 2005
• Jersey Boys Australia has about 60 people working backstage every night at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, but this only represents half the number needed backstage at The Gershwin Theatre each night for Wicked on Broadway
• all the music in Jersey Boys Australia is played live by a band in a room underneath the stage (with the exception of two bars in the opening number)
• While Jersey Boys Australia is confirmed until April 2010 at the 1,600-seat Princess Theatre, it is hoped Melbourne will be home to Jersey Boys for another six months to come, presumably before moving on to Sydney(?)
  

  Jersey Boys Original Melbourne Cast. Photo: The Age.

• the fore stage of the Jersey Boys set covers the traditional orchestra pit, which was filled with concrete for the hydraulic lifts needed to bring the stand-microphones and actors up from beneath (and will be jack-hammered out again when the show leaves this venue)
• Other than London, Melbourne is the only city outside North America to host Jersey Boys so far
• Two of the original Four Seasons members today have a financial interest in Jersey Boys
• there are actually four Frankie Valli’s in the Jersey Boys Melbourne company (Bobby Fox being the main one) and casting for four men less than 5′ 9″ with “that” falsetto took more than 9 months
• all the actors play their instruments live on stage each performance
• While many compare the jukebox musical style of Jersey Boys to that of Mamma Mia, the audience demographic couldn’t be more different … while groups of women flocked in droves to see Mamma Mia, Jersey Boys audience’s are filled with groups of men! (come on boys!)
• High school students can go to see Jersey Boys in Melbourne on Tuesday evenings and Saturday matinees with their teachers for only $51 (because Jersey Boys is on the VCAA playlist for VCE Theatre Studies)

If you haven’t seen Jersey Boys in Melbourne yet, I’d highly recommend getting in fast. This is a wonderful show and from all reports every bit the quality of Jersey Boys on Broadway.

Jersey Boys Australia

Tickets at Ticketek Australia

It struck me recently how fabulous Julianna Margulies’ performances are as Alicia Florrick on the American legal drama The Good Wife. Her acting is so seamless and believable, it’s an absolute feast to watch.

As we Drama teachers know all too well, our students don’t get out to the theatre that often to see fine performances. Sometimes this is for economic reasons (cheaper for a teenager to see a movie than go to the theatre) and other times the theatre may not be geographically accessible or even “cool” enough for our Drama and Theatre students to see on weekends.

Julianna Margulies as The Good Wife

This is where I believe we sometimes have to resign to the fact that even our most passionate Drama students would prefer to go to the movies ahead of the theatre. I’ve sent my students off to the movies before with recommendations on great film acting, but I can’t recall the last time I told them to watch a TV show for the same reason.

But, I’m so impressed with Julianna Margulies’ acting on The Good Wife, I’ll be telling my Year 12 Drama class to enjoy the show this weekend and take notes in their living rooms on how and why this actress is so impressive? Because in my opinion, Julianna Margulies is the best actress on television at the moment and it is my responsibility for my students studying acting to know that. I’m sure our post-show discussions back in class next week will be very worthwhile, indeed!

Learning Must Be Fun: Let’s face it, school isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs for many teenagers, so on the top of my priority list for effective Drama teaching is make sure as many of your lessons and activities as possible are fun for your students. While you’re at it, remind yourself that if you don’t make learning fun, you’ve lost half the class … instantly. I even take a risk and tell my students at the start of a course that one of my responsibilities is to ensure their learning in Drama will be fun for them and that they are encouraged to tell me whenever the fun has stopped!

Keep Your Students Engaged: I never stop asking my students what they’re into, no matter what year level. While my enquiries are genuine, it also enables me to stay young and by knowing what’s cool at the moment, I can always use this to my advantage to adapt a future exercise, drama game or activity, so my students remain engaged in Drama. These enquiries allow me to tailor ensemble performance topics to their interests etc. Being critical of your own teaching has its advantages, too. Mix it up a little and never get stale with your delivery, so your students keep engaged.

Know Your Students Well: I always make an effort to get to know my students, ask what bands their into, genres of music, films etc. Particularly if they are senior students. Always keep professional boundaries very clear. Never try to win students over by pretending to be their friend. You’re their teacher. But good teachers care for their students beyond the textbook and the classroom.

Set Clear Guidelines and Expectations: I set my expectations in the very first lesson of a Drama course, to avoid any confusion later on. I’ve blogged on The Drama Teacher before, that I will not accept laziness and lying (to the teacher) in my classroom. I make no apologies for it. I set my student expectations high at the beginning and spend most of my Drama courses encouraging (daring?) my students to see what they are capable of in Drama.

Ensure Everyone Respects Each other. Every Drama course I teach, at any level, begins with an agreement that my students firstly respect themselves, secondly respect other students in the class and thirdly respect me as their teacher. In return I tell them I will respect them all by default each time they enter my classroom. I ask students to respect why other students have elected to do this Drama course and to respect those that are less confident than themselves. This results in a warm atmosphere where less confident or able students are more prepared to take risks in performance work before their peers. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of respect in the Drama classroom.

Know Your Content. You can’t be a whiz in Drama teaching overnight. It takes time. Although I have blogged here before that in my opinion knowledge is not necessarily king in the Drama classroom, knowing your content certainly can’t go astray. Once you have gained much knowledge, two more things become important: firstly, remember we never stop learning and secondly, never be afraid to learn from a student. It empowers them and they respect you more as a teacher in return. Never pretend to know all the answers in front of your students.

90% Perspiration and 10% Inspiration. I’m sure many of you may have heard of this old adage. It’s true in Drama teaching, too. The most creative students you’ve ever seen in a Drama classroom will be useless if they are not prepared to put in the hard yards. I remind my students all the time, they have to be prepared to perspire if they want to achieve their own personal goals in Drama.

Keep Ownership with Your Students. When a school play or musical is a huge success, when an in-class Drama performance was fantastic, when your students performed beyond their wildest dreams … always keep the ownership with them, not you. While it may be true that you directed the musical, guided them in their class performance, or helped them every second step of the way, I always try to remind my students that the wonderful product they created belongs to them. This is when they smile and become very proud, but more importantly, realise what they are truly capable of in Drama. Encouragement and positive feedback will always return far bigger dividends than you ever expected in a discipline such as Drama.

Whether it is an A+ or a C, there’s nothing more satisfying than a Drama student being rewarded with a grade beyond what they believed they were capable of. Using these tips, above, has worked wonders for me over the years. I hope they work for you, too.

The New York Times Well, the New York Times is not only the biggest newspaper in the world, but it also has the most comprehensive theatre section of any online newspaper. Hell, just the fact that it has a theatre section is a wonderful thing! Understandably, information is Broadway-centric, with intellectual theatre reviews, image slideshows, interviews with theatre practitioners from directors to actors and more, industry buzz (what’s hot and what’s not) and videos. Target demographic: the adult theatre connoisseur.

Playbill.com Yep, that company that produces your theatre programs and other merchandise has been around since 1884 and on the web since the early days of 1994. The Playbill website is jam-packed with industry news focusing on Broadway, but also with sections for regional US and International theatre. You can get the latest theatre listings, Broadway box office grosses, industry casting information, interviews with actors, celebrities and playwrights. You can also purchase Broadway theatre tickets at Playbill, check out multimedia galleries or purchase from arguably the largest theatre merchandise store on the web … now open for non-US visitors as well. You’ll find everything from key rings and t-shirts to coffee mugs and posters available at the Playbill store for a wide range of Broadway musicals and plays.

Guardian.co.uk The Guardian’s online culture section is a rich source of information for UK theatre, from large West End productions to small Edinburgh Fringe monologues. What I love about this site is the prominence of multimedia, with plenty of image galleries and videos of theatre news stories and interviews. You can find hundreds of theatre reviews, industry buzz, behind the scenes news and a comprehensive back-catalogue of theatre-related articles at the Guardian.

Part 2 coming soon….

Understandably, there’s barely a theatre enthusiast on the planet who wouldn’t recognise most or all of the show titles on Broadway’s Top 10 list.

Such is the timeless appeal of the Broadway musical, there are no plays on the list. Yet, they’re not all musicals, either. Nine of Broadway’s longest running shows may well be musicals, but Oh, Calcutta! was a revue.

The black sheep on Broadway’s biggest list, Oh, Calcutta! originally opened off-Broadway in 1969. But it was the revival on Broadway some years later that show stomped it into becoming one of the longest running productions in history. From 1976 to 1989, the Oh, Calcutta! revival ran for nearly 6,000 performances at the Edison Theatre. The show also holds claim to fame as the only risque theatrical production on the list, as it’s plot involved several extended nude scenes. The rest of the shows on the list are definitely more tame than Oh, Calcutta!

1. * The Phantom of the Opera (9,133 perf)
2. Cats (7,485 perf)
3. Les Miserables (6,680 perf)
4. A Chorus Line (6,137 perf)
5. Oh! Calcutta (5,959 perf)
6. * CHICAGO (5,462 perf)
7. Beauty and the Beast (5,461 perf)
8. Rent (5,124 perf)
9. * The Lion King (5,078 perf)
10. Miss Saigon (4,097 perf)

* still running. Source: broadwayworld.com.

Australia is experiencing a boom in documentary and verbatim theatre. From plays about forgotten Australians to docudramas dealing with political scandals and crimes, a bracingly factual scene is reinforcing the stage’s role as an eagle-eyed witness to our times

Successful documentary drama is occurring today in several major cities and regional centres of not just Australia, but other countries as well. While this form of theatre-making may not always attract the populous crowds of mainstream productions, it nevertheless has its place in contemporary theatre.

Kenneth Pickering, in his excellent book “Key Concepts in Drama and Performance” notes it was the great French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre who called documentary drama “theatre of fact” in his essay Myth and Reality in Theatre (1966). Whether one calls it “documentary drama”, “documentary theatre” or “theatre of fact” is probably just a matter of semantics. As is the case with whether we refer to it as a theatre genre or theatre style? If there are differences between what some know as documentary drama and others know as theatre of fact, they are probably subtle.

Most agree the form as we know it today originated in Germany in the early 1960s, consisting of plays about recent historical events, including the horrors of the Nazi regime. But documentary theatre existed in the USSR around the time of the Russian Revolution, it was being examined by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in Germany in the 1920s and with The Living Newspaper (part of the The Federal Theatre Project) in America in the 1930s. In all cases, this theatre was political propaganda, set up for social change. The late Augusto Boal used his position as a city councillor in Rio de Janiero to create his Forum Theatre for social change, in effect creating another form of documentary drama based on factual events.

Documentary drama uses historical records of real events as its foundation. Verbatim theatre, according to Rosemary Neill’s article in Review, originated in the 1960s in regional Britain in order to “give marginalised communities a voice”. It goes one step further and deliberately uses the actual words of people involved in the event, onstage.

But can we use documentary and verbatim theatre in the drama classroom and if so, is it likely to succeed? Some of the most successful work I have undertaken with my senior high Drama students in the past three years has been doing exactly these types of projects.

It was borne out of the freedom entitled to me as a Drama teacher to choose a topic of my choice for my Year 12 Drama students to write, direct and perform as a major play for part of their final year assessment. I suspected if I chose a historical event of some worth and motivated my students to undertake heavy research in order to write and perform a quality script, they just might bite the carrot.

In 2007 my Year 12 Drama students wrote and performed their own documentary theatre piece on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The following year my senior Drama class performed two separate pieces on Hurricane Katrina from 2005. Last year, my Year 12 Drama class divided into two even groups – one exploring the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, the other dramatising the events of the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. This year, my senior class will dramatise the events of British nuclear testing in Australia during the 1950s and 60s. Each year I have tweaked these projects, learning from previous mistakes, so that the project improves the following year.

My findings indicate successful documentary theatre with school students should involve:

• a factual event(s) worthy of investigation
• substantial preparation by the teacher in advance of delivering the project
• enough research information available for students (preferably web-based)
• proper research by the students
• effective scriptwriting based on adequate research
• a clear understanding of both sides/perspectives of the event(s)
• event(s) that has a lead up time – heightens the plot, builds tension
• non-inflammatory theatre – try not to sensationalise
• theatre based on the facts, rather than individual or group opinions
• clear timelines, as a chronology of events can translate into scenes
• episodic ensemble performances work well (as with Brecht)
• time shifts (flashbacks etc) are very effective
• fast jumps in location are also effective, but ensure it is clear to audience
• investigative elements, cover-ups, secret documents, tension, victims
• pockets of verbatim theatre weaved in (snippets of Presidential speeches etc)
• students playing multiple characters with simple costume changes are acceptable

In 20 year of teaching, I can honestly say that I have NEVER got a group of senior Drama students more engaged in an academic task than those listed above, with this bullet list of tips being used along the way. It was hard work, but fun at the same time. Most importantly, if the teacher acts as a facilitator and guide, the students will feel they legitimately own their piece of documentary theatre and when they perform it to parents and friends, they will genuinely believe their small play has made a difference to the world they live in. You can’t ask for any more than that!