Webpage Supplement to
Chapter 11: Playbuilding with Pacific Island Students
Daniel A. Kelin, II
September 27, 2006
Good examples of Prof.
Kelin’s work may be found on his website! Highly recommended, dynamic,
touching:
www.geocities.com/scbwihawaii/members/kelin-d.html
or
some of my work
at
www.prel.org/eslstrategies/drama.html ---
1. More about Playbuilding: This method involves a process of evoking
from the participants some vignettes from their own lives. This is a
partly improvised process. These are then put together and crafted into
a production (Weigler, 2001; Sklar, 1991). It is related in a way to
the chapter in the book on Self-Revelatory Performance, only this is
more of a group endeavor.
The groups involved often deal with cultural transitions, teenagers
coping with stresses, minorities struggling for rights and recognition,
immigrants, and so forth. This activity results in a community-building
process, among the players, and among the different subgroups in the
audiences. (It is thus related in function to such approaches as
Playback Theatre.) As a group experience, the project builds a sense of
connectedness among the actors and reduces alienation. The words and
performances that are produced in the course of playbuilding also often
carry political and economic messages, addressing hardships of certain
roles and classes in our culture, thus relating the method to the
Theatre of the Oppressed.
2. The Background for This Chapter: The effectiveness of playbuilding
with Pacific Island youth first struck me (Kelin) in 1992 through my
outreach work with the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, servicing a Marshall
Islands social service agency for youth. The work builds naturally on
the oral and dance traditions used for cultural storytelling, which
offers the students a rewarding process and significant and personal
ways to achieve success.
Many schools in Hawaii have an ever-increasing concentration of
Filipino, Samoan and Micronesian students, many of whom are placed in
ESL (English as Second Language) programs. When asked to
implement drama programming with these students, it seemed
fundamentally appropriate to apply the same process to these
classes. Involving these students in a play-building drama
residency exercises their oral communication and language skills, which
is a significant step toward expanding reading and writing skills as
well
3. Further Notes on Method:
To begin a playbuilding residency with such students, the participants
first experiment with various drama techniques to build knowledge of
and comfort with the techniques to later apply them to building brief
plays from a story. The classes I work with generally include between 8
and 25 students, with each session lasting between 45 and 90 minutes,
the longer time periods, the older the students.
In early ensemble exercises, we use activities that utilize the whole
body, because I have found that students are most uncomfortable
expressing with their bodies, and this helps to make them more
comfortable. Our experiments creating frozen images first involve
working alone, then in pairs and groups. Too often, some teachers
suggest removing this warm-up, because it takes time and is not
directly task related. However, they miss the point.
In one class of high school students of Mexican and Micronesian
ethnicity, there was a bit of tension as the students stood up to try
the drama activities for the first time. With just a couple of
exceptions, the students eyed each other, afraid of embarrassing
themselves in front of each other. We worked through the
activities, even though the commitment was not that high.
However, once we got into the story, they began to loosen up as their
focus switched to the story’s content. They already understood the
techniques, so felt more comfortable about using them. By the time we
shared the playbuilt story with each other, the students not only were
having fun, but some had “mixed it up,” joined in with students with
whom they normally did not work..
... Another refinement is that it often helps if the introduced story
comes from a less well-known culture, as this will open a door into
that culture, inviting the rest of the students a chance to learn more
about that particular culture. Through the process of hearing the
story and then playbuilding from it, the students will discover aspects
of the culture that they will want to know more about. The
student(s) who are of that culture will then become the experts of the
class, sharing more in-depth information about their culture and
concurrently gain a stronger sense of self. In addition,
establishing the students as the experts early on is a useful
tool. When any of the other students are unsure about a
particular part of the story or culture, then the instructor can seek
consul from the student(s) of that culture.
For example, I worked in one classroom that included a girl from
Kiribati, a Pacific nation no one, not even the teacher, knew anything
about. Since her language skills were limited, she had a
difficult time explaining anything. I introduced the story
“Tebwere, Tebarere, Tetintiri and the Giant” from her culture and it
not only made her sit up and take notice, the other students
immediately saw her in a new light. The same happened with a boy
in another class who quickly became the point of focus for his
classmates. For days afterwards they kept asking him about
particulars of the story; “Are the chiefs really like that?” “Are your
islands that small?” “Have you ever crawled inside one of those clams
yourself?”
Ideally, someone tells the story to the class. It should
definitely not be read, as the students come to rely on the words in
the book, looking for the "correct" version of the story or the
"correct" words a character says. The process then becomes too
pre-determined and too controlled. In addition, this is a wonderful
chance for the instructor to model for the students the free-flowing
and improvisational nature of the playbuilding process.
For instructors who may be concerned about telling the story instead of
a student, I note I only do this when working for the first time with a
group of students. I do not like to put that much pressure on any
one student this early in the process. However, once a group
becomes comfortable with the playbuilding process, then the students
themselves should become the story collectors and tellers.
Several times, just a day after I shared a story, students returned
with stories of their own that they had asked for from their parents or
other relatives. In some cultures, stories are the property of
family or community. For this reason, instructors should proceed
with caution when it comes to sharing stories not from their own
culture. There are unwritten rules and guidelines about
particular stories and ways of telling. Instructors are
encouraged to seek counsel before taking on a story unfamiliar to them.
When the class experiences the story in this manner, the class then has
a common experience and sense of the story that will guide the next few
steps in the process. This common experience is akin to one that
brings cultures together in unique ways, as many cultures have
particular ways and times to share stories.
. .
I have always found that giving students a menu of choices gives them a
good place to start when asked to create.
The initial warm-up to drama is a good example. As the students
become comfortable with drama, they build a menu of exploratory
techniques. They come to see the different ways the body, the
voice and imagination can work together and help them communicate their
ideas and creations. ..
If a scene takes place on a street, a group of students can be
other people on the street, another group can provide vocal sound
effects of a street and others might be fire hydrants and lampposts.
Tableaux notes:
The tableau step solidified for me when I worked with a group that had a hard time focusing on tasks. I chose to spend a good amount of time on creating, assessing and redoing the tableau in the hopes that they would come to focus on details of the story. One group got nowhere. They stood around pretending to be the people “talking,” but had no action suggested in their creation. Instead of focusing on what they did not have, I asked them about each of their characters and what those characters individually wanted and was doing. After each had thought about that, offering a variety of answers, I then asked them to show me what the characters look like when they are doing what they want. After each had an individual frozen image, we put them back together, focusing on the most aligned characters. This kind of detailed evaluation helped focus the students on active choices for their characters and scenes, and gave them a very specific place from which to continue the playbuilding.
Building Scenes
When the students share their
developing playbuilt scenes with each other, I refer to the sharing as
"rehearsals" to clarify that the work is not final and the pressure is
not on for them to get it "right" or "perfect." In fact, I find
it essential to allow them to stop as they need to and restart as many
times as they need. This keeps an air of informality to the
sharing of their developing scenes, letting them know there is plenty
of time for them to get their scene into a shape they like. I
tell the students that the final "performance" will be when we present
the whole story without stopping.
One class actually built on this experience. As the groups had
the chance to watch each other developing and rehearsing their part of
the story, a couple of the groups actually built on ideas from the
others. Instead of running all around the room during a chase
scene, one group stood in place and played the chase out in slow
motion. Another group thought it was such a good idea, they
borrowed it for their own scene.
At the end of the process, the groups share their final "performance."
Thus, the students play-build from a whole story of their own
choice. They, rather than the teachers, become the experts,
culturally, as storytellers and as the dramatizers of the stories.
Further References:
Bray, Errol. (1994). Playbuilding: a guide for group creation of
plays with young people. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Oddey, Alison. (1994). Devising theatre: a practical and theoretical
handbook. London: Routledge.
Sklar, Daniel J. (1991). Playmaking: Children writing and performing
their own plays. New York: Teachers & Writers’ Collaborative.
Weigler, Will. (2001). Strategies for Playbuilding: Helping groups to
translate issues into theatre. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.A
systematic approach to creating script, song, choreography..mainly with
young people.
A related activity is the making of a movie together, as described by
Dan Wiener in his chapter in the book titled “The Movie-experience.”
Phillips. Techniques described on:
http://phillips.personal.nccu.edu.tw/improvlang/games-nccu.html
]: This teacher uses various games to help his
Taiwanese-Chinese students learn English as a Second Language
Whiteson, Valerie. New ways of using drama and literature in language
teaching. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other
Languages, 1996.