Courses: Creative Drama

Creative Drama /Acting:

Remember playing make-believe? You could imagine you were a knight using your sword or a queen ruling your empire. What if you could pretend to be a knight or a queen in a class with other characters while learning school subjects and exploring social dynamics?

Creative drama is a type of theater used for educational purposes that helps children work on social skills and academic subjects using theater games and improvisations while being led by a trained instructor. It provides a safe environment for students to explore behavior, ideas, creativity, and school subjects. Ultimately, creative drama is an out-of-the-box approach to learning that engages imagination, concentration, and sensory awareness in a theater environment.

Kids can do role-playing exercises to learn about themselves and others socially, and dramatizing a story allows students to find new alternatives and make decisions. The exercises are researched and structured to help in academic areas while reinforcing study skills and language. However, creative drama is not formal, and no written scripts are used. The dialogue in the exercises is improvisational and based on stories and subjects discussed and developed by the children.

These activities build self-discipline, self-esteem, and relationships with others. The art of creative drama lies in technique, and the exercises explore the imagination, dramatic technique, sensory awareness, and concentration.

Creative Drama incorporates the following techniques:

• Pantomime: Pantomime is the expression of non-verbal communication, showing how much we can say without speaking and communicating with gestures.
• Improvisation: Improvations are planned, but the action and dialogue are performed spontaneously in the moment.
• Role-Playing: The children act out a life problem and play different roles in the scenario.
• Sense Memory Improvisation: These exercises emphasize the five senses - sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste - and work on sound and visual perception. We experience life through our senses; seeing and hearing are essential reading and reading comprehension tools.
• Emotions: Children learn to express and understand their emotions with these exercises. They have a safe place to explore their feelings and the feelings of others through role-playing.
• Characterization: These improvisations teach the similarities and differences of people, such as physicality, culture, age, religion, and ethnicity. Kids can learn about real people and characters in literature and experience how to think, feel, move, and behave like the person they are portraying.
• Dialogue: Children use dialogue to express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings. They can discuss and organize the dialogue in the scenes they act out, and then, after the scenes are performed, they express their responses to the scenes.
• Story Dramatization: The children act out stories they write, enjoy, or have heard previously. They can also create stories to dramatize in small groups.

Creative drama follows an order of techniques so the students can grasp the concepts in each area before moving to the next. The sequence of exercises is Pantomime, Sense Memory Improvisation, Emotions, Characterization, Dialogue, and Story Dramatization. Improvisation and Role-Playing are used in each of these disciplines.

Example of Creative Drama

Creative drama begins with a warm-up exercise such as relaxation, improvisation, or theater game for the whole group. This activity creates a place of creativity and community for everyone simultaneously. The leader establishes a mood in the room verbally or with music and also sets up the performance space.

This is a drop-off class. Parents are invited into the classroom for the last 5 to 10 minutes of each class.

Course Pricing:
Courses for Creative Dance are available in weekly 60-minute open sessions. For private lessons, please contact us.

Payment plans are available upon request.

Check out these acting photos in the photo gallery below.