Taking the dramatic turn
Pradita Nambiar
I was surprised to see one full period of 40 minutes allotted to drama in the school timetable. I sat down in the staff room wondering what I should do during this class. It brought back memories of my drama days in school. The last time I did drama was when I was 12 years old. I was keenly looking forward to saying a lot of dialogues, but the teacher decided to make me a palace guard and I was told not to even bat an eyelid. My mother who came to watch the drama, came running to me after the annual day function and asked, “I never saw you on stage, where were you? “I told her I was the guard who stood still. She sensed my disappointment and comforted me saying, “It’s actually very difficult to stand still on stage and only very few children can actually do that.” The next year at the school drama, I got to move, I was one of the many rats that went behind the Pied-piper. I wanted my mother to notice me, but all the rats had to scurry behind the piper and it was only our backs that the audience could see.
What is it about drama that is believed to be integral to learning? I went around asking teachers who have been dealing with drama about their ideas on ‘doing drama’. The first year at drama was fraught with multiple challenges. The first step was to choose a play that I would like to stage. My co-teacher in the other section became my guide and mentor. I brought a number of short stories from home and we finally decided on a story which had children going on a train journey without their parents. I would be lying if I said that I converted it into a play. My co-teacher wrote the script of the play and I was trying to figure out what made her choose this story over the others. She then clarified that this story had many characters as it was set on a railway platform and thereafter the story progresses in the train. It had the serious looking railway guard, the omnipresent chaiwalla who is more heard than seen, the silent porter with his bright red shirt and the red bandana, apart from the various co-passengers and relatives who crowd the railway stations. This scene is also one which most children can relate to. It also enabled us to get a majority of the children to participate. The story was of a suitable length to be staged in the school. And finally, the story had an element of drama or theatrical to it which unfolds at the end.
What is drama without accompanying sound effects! This one had scope for plenty. We got the children into groups where they would seat themselves behind a tree and make the sound of the train reaching a station and leaving it. Mind you, it may be the same train coming and going but the sound it makes is different each time. Children covered their mouths with their lips against their palms and blew into their palms, making the sound of the train. With this the mouths let out a chuk, chuk… sound. The speed of the chuk, chuk sound depicted whether the train was arriving or departing. Apart from practice to perfect the sound, it required timing with the events happening on stage. The train announcements and sound that precedes it is very typical of railway stations. The children were becoming aware that these are voices that we only hear, but never see. Many children told me that now they listen to the announcements more keenly. We all know the quirky ways in which the chaiwalla and other vendors sell their wares. Each one of them has his own distinct style of calling out. The chaiwalla was so loud with his “chai…chai…chaaai” that his voice echoed much after the play ended.
What about body movements? Drama allows children to experience complete freedom of movement of their bodies and limbs. This is a moment of self-revelation. The children who were in the train had to enact the wobbly movements whilst walking inside a speeding train compartment. Even whilst sitting, the children acting as passengers who were seated had to move their body forward and backward giving the impression of a moving train. At any point in time, when specific characters engage in a conversation, the others had to engage themselves in some action to make it look realistic.
The practice sessions required coordination at various levels – of the body, gestures, and voice. The children were as much a part of this directorial venture as the teachers. How could I leave out the way we did the casting! The only thumb rule that I had to guide me was that I wanted the children who were silent in my class to get as much and more opportunity to participate. This was a very tricky task. I had to remind myself that I was not in the business of creating actors. Drama was only a learning process for the children and me to work together accepting diversity in abilities. Children start valuing their own uniqueness and drama fosters a positive attitude to one’s own abilities and aptitudes. The least expected was complaints from parents regarding the casting. The children I was dealing with were just about 10 years old and I was confronted with the expectations of parents on the roles their children played. Drama has this uncanny ability to help experience openness with others and build an atmosphere of trust, respect, and cooperation on which the birth of a drama takes place.
I would constantly prod the children to memorize the lines and play the fictional situation. I realized the enormity of this task, when recently I had to play the role of a conniving and scheming old woman who is waiting to catch the person who murdered her son in an Alfred Hitchcock drama. This was staged without any mikes, on the walkway of a small restaurant. I struggled to enter physically, mentally, and emotionally into the fictional context. I frequently went into the role of a good narrator, but a poor actor. There was a need to accept the symbolic as real. Drama involves heightened awareness of all senses and it is a total body experience and a liberating one.
What else do children learn while doing drama? Drama provides the fictional context to explore and discover possibilities. Some children improvise their role and come up with innovative ideas. This sets the stage for other children to experiment with verbal and non-verbal forms of expressions. Children realize that the stage is a place where they can openly and honestly explore life situations. I vividly remember in this particular drama, a child had to show disbelief. He jumped up in surprise that made all the coactors automatically jump up too. He exaggerated the expression of ‘disbelief’ thus bringing theatrical into action.
Creation of drama has its share of conflicts and I welcome these situations as it pushes each one of us to resolve these constructively. It not only shapes the people involved in the conflict, but also those observing how the issue is being dealt with.
At the Alfred Hitchcock play, there was more than one director guiding us and at times it became very confusing as one would instruct me and the second one would suggest another alternative. I now put myself into the shoes of the children I had directed. I finally decided to do what I was comfortable with. But what do you do when somebody forgets the lines on stage and your cues lie in those lines? These challenges bring forth the ability to react to other characters on stage. In my play, my co-actor a 67 year old man forgot his lines frequently and jumped pages and scenes along with it. The ability to understand, appreciate and cherish differences and respond to them is what children learn whilst doing drama. These situations push the children to explore new possibilities.
I have noticed that children own their drama and everything that needs to make it come alive after they get into the fictional context. Understanding the context not only helps children to recall their lines, use their body better but also take responsibility to do all the other work to support the production, such as making props.
Most of the time we hear that drama helps in learning language, for instance, in writing dialogues, acquiring new words and developing self-confidence. I am no expert in this, but my few years of engagement has confirmed there is much more to doing and creating drama than just this. Drama provides an insight into topics and themes which are vital to the development of the child. When children have to act anger, sorrow, fear, or any positive or negative emotions, drama helps them enter the place of personal enquiry and the existence of human dimension in the acquisition of knowledge.
So is drama about voice, gestures, body movements, props and all the life lessons that is learnt along the way? If anybody ever thought that drama was all about creativity and hence there was no room for discipline, then that would be a fallacy. I would rank learning to be a disciplined audience as important as everything else that I discussed about drama. And this is learnt best during rehearsals. There have been several instances of chattering backstage which impacts the performance of children on stage. Children have to be reminded that this too is an important aspect of staging a drama. Getting them to be a keen audience was no less an outcome in learning.
Writing about what children learn from drama or what doing drama does to children is like killing a story by telling the moral of the story. For drama produces different learnings for different children and teachers. I am just a novice; it is only my curiosity to know why should children do drama that drove me to dive deep in search of answers. I also had the responsibility of doing drama with children for two years and writing reports on this aspect of learning. The book series Let’s Act by Kenneth Nuttall in the school library was a guide to me. There could not be any better compelling reasons. But there are teachers out there whom I have seen work at drama, who would give hundreds of more reasons to do drama and I hope to discover them as I traverse this path.
The author is a teacher currently pursuing her masters in elementary education, TISS, Mumbai. Her writings are ways to evaluate and analyze her own practices. She can be reached at pradita_n@yahoo.com.
