Contents
What is Drama in Education?
The answer is simple. Playing Drama cultivates humanities. Some educator mislead the answer and make pupils dolls on the stage, costumed lovely. Not just at schools, theatre is the field of education.
Before age 9, pupils play all the time. They are on the edge of fantasy and reality. After age 9, their SELVES start to be separated and characters appear. (Even 3 years old kids change their attitude toward different person though.)
As a player, what aspect of humanities do they cultivate?
Light on the individuality
Drama is not the entertainment.Drama is the field of education, which literally means “educing” humanities.
So pupils sometimes have a pain. Directors direct their strength and weakness. Sometimes timid pupils shows courage. Director or teacher should catch the moments of such changes and give them feedbacks.
Understanding the others
Taking a role of the others, pupil can vibrant images of others. They also understand the different situation lead different reaction, which sounds naturally true even we do not play drama!!
So what is the signature of Drama in Education? To make a good show? Never!
Drama in Education consists of
-the simulated reality or fantasy (text or script)
-feedback of teacher or director(direction)
Drama does not happen only on the stage in the theatre.
Every event in our life time can be drama.
What makes Drama in Education different from our real life is the existence of a director, who helps their understanding their SELVES (however, parents or friends can be a director potentially). From the perspective of equality of opportunity, drama as subject take a great role in education .
Feedback can teach them how to communicate with others effectively, how to show their mind to others, how to listen, how to speak. We can teach them how human being think and react, how busy our brains are, how emotion leads us dangerous situation, how to deal with emotions, how social status changes our attitude, or so.
Drama in Education is the subject which tries to answer the question “who we are? What is the mind?”
Mental health
According to several academic papers, it is said that separation of SELVES have bad effect on mental health.
A director will encourage actors to enter onto the stage of life.
The state of missing or ignoring some actors in a script causes mental disorder, violence and harassment and possibly devastates the richness of one’s life. Covered with consciousness, actors tend to be immersed in unconsciousness. Actors can show themselves even without such a line in a script.
Training for professionals
Sound amplifies actors. Sound helps actors change their breath. Like the sudden alarm drives our body stiff, sound go inside.
Gap between 4th and 5th
In some music theories, there are notes called “perfect 4th” and “perfect 5th”. How do people feel this difference? What happens inside singers when they sing a gap of 4th or 5th? We should pay more attention to the characters of sound.
Usage of breath
Listening means getting the air into the body and the mind, which we call breath. We use three kinds of breath. We use the all breathes and it is always mixed like the harmony of sounds or colors. Basic breath is from the bottom of our body. Middle breath is from chest. The last is from the head. Never from the throat!! Do actors have interaction with their own breathes? Changing mind means changing breath.
Synchronize or Conflict
In the case, the tempo of some sounds is the same as that of an actor’s breath, so that sound synchronize with and activate an actor’s acting like harmony in music.
See “Love song”(4:05) in The Ugly One
In another case, sound appears in the different tempo from acting, so that the conflict amplifies the energy for acting like a proper amount of stress educes one’s potentiality.
See “Lullaby”(5:12) in Macbeth