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As part of the Playworks Program here at the International Thespian festival, students have the opportunity to audition and rehearse one of the plays being workshopped. The audition day was very intense. We sat through auditions from 9:00 am straight through to 12:45 and then we have half an hour to cast the roles between five plays. Students were put in groups and performed in scenes from the individual plays with monologues, duets or trios. Over the course of the morning, we say 185 students and that doesn't count the students we saw twice who were called back. By 11 am we were starting to feel the time crunch. Call backs were discouraged, repeat reads had to be culled down, we had to see the groups and move on if we were ever going to make sure every students got their moment.

This lesson uses video segments from Great Performances: The Little Mermaid from San Francisco Ballet to help students explore the role of the author in relation to his/her work. In the Introductory Activity, students discuss the structure of the original The Little Mermaid tale as they remember it. Students then read the original story and compare their memories to the original text. In the Learning Activity, students examine John Neumeier's artistic interpretation of the classic fairy-tale by looking at two video segments that feature the main characters of the ballet. Finally, for the Culminating Activity, students craft their own contemporary interpretation of a classic fairy-tale (e.g., Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty).

"I'm absolutely thrilled to be with you. I can feel the energy in the room. I fell in love with high school students a couple of years ago. I was invited to speak at a high school theatre conference in Utah. I walked in-I was literally in a basketball stadium-and the basketball stadium was full of high school students, thousands of high school students and every one of them was a theatre lover. And if I said in my address: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, they would all cheer yeah! There were these two guys at the conference who were sitting behind me, and you might have heard of them-their names are Benj Pasek and Justin Paul?"

In this lesson, students discuss the meaning of clowns and explore the themes of spontaneity and laughter as well as vulnerability. Guided classroom discussions help students to explore misconceptions about clowns as well as how the clown could be a "master of failure." Reflective writing prompts are also included for students to demonstrate their understanding of the story.

I have been teaching properties design and production classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for over two decades. Prior to that, I worked professionally as a properties director, properties artisan and designer when UWM recruited me to start a props training program in the professional training tracks. Students came to the theatre department with a passion for technical theatre having hung lights, built scenery, or run a show in high school or community theatre. However few were familiar with props or had even an inkling a professional properties career was a possibility. Each class of students sifted out a gifted few who excelled in the props area. These students have gone on to have highly successfu

The culminating activity for collaboration in the drama classroom is to have your students work on a devising project. It will definitely show you how well your students work together! More on devising in the next blog post, but here's an exercise to get your students in the right frame of mind.

The new experimental study published in Education Next examines the impact on students of attending high-quality theater productions of either Hamlet or A Christmas Carol. The researchers found that viewing the productions leads to enhanced knowledge of the plot, increased vocabulary, greater tolerance and improved ability to read the emotions of others.

"Diana Agrest believes architecture is so much more than a marriage of form and function. For more than four decades, she's been trying to get her students to believe that too."

One of my favorite lessons I do is having my students work in groups to create TV commercials inspired by works. Check it out below. It never fails to be a fun time in the classroom!

This narrative document outlines the philosophy, primary goals, dynamic processes, structures , and outcomes that shape student learning and achievement in dance, media arts, music, theatre, and visual arts, as articulated in the National Core Arts Standards .

Start the exercise with a discussion. What is a mixed message? What does it look like and sound like? Give this definition: Mixed messages say one thing with the body and another thing with the voice.

The basic marshmallow challenge (detailed instructions here) is an ideal exercise to sharpen collaboration skills. It's works because it's so simple: groups of four are given 18 minutes to build the tallest free standing building they can with 20 sticks of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The time limit is important - it forces students to collaborate quickly. The competition aspect is also important - this pushes groups to work at their best.

Students often get hung up on the notion that in the theatre, sets, costumes, props all have to meet the standard of the movies. They have to be three dimensional and real. A car must have four wheels and move. A house must have two levels and different rooms. The truth is actually quite different - a theatre audience is very forgiving. If you let them know what world the play inhabits (two people sitting side by side on cubes, one holds their hands up as if holding a steering wheel) they will believe. They will go along for the ride. A single object can be so many different things - a chair can be a chair, or a car, or a mountain. The possibilities are endless.