Study Guide

This activity is for 4thfourth grade beginning theater students.

Students will participate in and perform a tableau, gaining understanding of the importance of physical body movement in creating and portraying a character. This will help make their characters more believable in performance.

Students will sit in a circle. I will tell them that we are going to work on creating stage pictures, or tableaus, that illustrate a situation to an audience by using facial expression, body movement, different levels (standing up, squatting down), but without voices. A person looking at a tableau, should be able to understand through our bodies alone. I will also tell them that in a tableau expressions and gestures are usually bigger than normal so the viewer can get a clear picture of what is happening.

I will ask them to imagine their favorite actor has just entered the cafeteria. We’ll share thoughts as to what they might feel, should that happen. I expect to receive answers such as excited, nervous, shy, disbelief. I will ask them to show me what these emotions look like using facial expression, explaining that everyone is likely to have different reactions and all these reactions are good. Being in this circle, students will see each of their classmates’ faces so they will notice there are many ways to express their reaction. We will discuss many of these, asking questions such as “What did we see from someone who was nervous? How was their facial expression different from the excited person?”

We’ll then talk about how we react with more than our faces to different situations but with our whole bodies. Doing this can help an audience better understand our reaction and ultimately better understand our character as a person. I will stand up and have the students give me a situation that I will need to create a tableau for (such as being tired). I will illustrate using my face, as well as my body (bringing my hand to my mouth to yawn, lying on the floor, etc.).

The students will then stand up and, individually, illustrate with their faces and bodies a series of situations/emotions that I will give them. I’ll need to remind them that these are silent activities and relying solely on our bodies, not our voices, to create these tableaus. As we go through the different situations (waiting for a bus, acting heroic, and others), I will prompt the students to remember to use their arms and legs, and to take advantage of different levels, such as bending over or reaching up.

To assess students’ understanding, students will individually pick an emotion card out of a jar and create an individual tableau to convey that emotion to the class. Other students will describe what they see the actor is doing (facial/body expressions). If any of the students are having difficulty, I will share the emotion card with the group and ask their peers to make helpful suggestions to clarify the tableau.

As we proceed during the coming classes, we will work on creating tableaus using multiple students to illustrate a scene from a book or a situation. Each student will need to work with the others but create their own individual picture for the tableaus. The students will express what their character or person’s unique reactions are in this situation through their choice of a stage picture.

This supports the learning standard because students are learning how nonverbal actions (body movement and facial expression) are important in creating a character and in portraying that character in a performance.

The following lesson is for an advanced high school theater class:

Students will prepare a design concept of a play, illustrating how one area of theater production (costumes, sets, lighting, etc.) conveys the play’s social, cultural, and historical context.

In previous classes, we have read plays such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. I shared a summary of research done around Death of a Salesman, specifically focusing on the theme of the American Dream. I described some of the influential events that occurred in the world at the time it was written, as well as what the country was like in terms of defining success. Once we reviewed this summary, I then posed to them the following guiding questions: (1) how does an understanding of the period and social/cultural mood of the era impact a designer’s choices and (2) how might a designer convey the feeling of the loss of the American dream in Willy’s life? We could consider how using greys in Willy’s costumes with small bits of color (such as a necktie) might symbolize earlier remnants of Willy’s hope expressed during the beginning of the play. We discussed choices made with respect to set design, costuming, lighting, etc., and noted how those design choices impacted the effectiveness of relaying the theme of the American Dream.

In this lesson, students are asked to select a play to research and develop a design concept around one area of production (costumes, sets, lighting, etc.) based on the information they have uncovered as well as their interpretation of an identified theme in the play. I will provide students with guiding questions and relevant prompts to aid students in the creation of a design presentation (ex. sketches, sound cues, multimedia), including elements they might incorporate. For example, they will research the setting of the play and the time it was written, and they might consider how a costume designer’s choice of color, period of clothing, etc. best illustrate the social, cultural and historical context.

Then, I will present a rubric to the students that will be the basis for assessing their presentations. I will give the students an opportunity to contribute additional ideas to the rubric. The students’ ideas, which they have collectively worked on and that are grounded in their research and design concepts, will be incorporated into the rubric. For example, students might include references to historical events, criteria related to their design element, and/or inclusion of video and audio components. This aligns with the learning goal because they have investigated how plays are influenced by their context and how that context informs their own work.