Richards Middle School
Hughes – Meagan Cascone
Learning Objective/Exit Outcomes:
- Students will be able to describe the process of theatre production from audition to final performance.
- Students will be able to show the different steps through a variety of movements.
Integration Area/Subject:
Theatre & Dance
State Standards:
TA6.CR.1e. Recognize and demonstrate the roles, responsibilities, and skills associated with collaborative performance.
MSD.CR.2. Demonstrate an understanding of dance as a form of communication.
Materials/Playing Space:
Open Classroom Space
Description:
We first had a class discussion about what the word movement meant to them. A lot of the responses were “moving set pieces, learning choreography, the relationship of one thing to affect the next thing starting.”
Next, the teacher told us what our starting point of production would be. This was the audition. The PAIR Specialist explained that we wanted a movement representation of each stage of the production process, which would total ten steps. For each step, the PAIR Specialist got the students’ ideas of what the next step would be and gave them time to create a movement that correlated to the step. The steps ended up being (audition, cast list, read the script, read thru, rehearsals, memorizing lines, adding in some props or costume pieces, tech week, final dress rehearsal, final performance).
Once we had all ten steps, the PAIR Specialist challenged the students to complete this process with their own body movement, 1-10, completely silently and she would guess by their movement what step they were representing. This challenged the students to use all of their body to be very specific.
Notes:
The goal of this lesson was for the students to really understand how much goes into the full production and to realize how quickly this all has to happen in order to be ready for opening night.
Remember to ask a final question that brings the class back to realizing the goal. Something like, “How long do we think all of these steps will take to be ready? Are there small steps that happen in between all of these that extend the time it takes?”