Drama Tuesday - How to Make a Drama Teacher
/How to Make a Drama teacher
I return to a favourite topic: I am preparing a proposal to present at the next IDEA Congress in Reykjavik Iceland in July 2022 (More information available at: https://ideaiceland.com).
Again, I propose talking about Drama Teacher Education. I wanted to include a fun way of thinking through this issue and share with you the latest tongue in cheek recipe for making a drama teacher.
Happy to let the images speak the words:
Music Monday - ANZAC Day
/Anzac Day. One of the most important days in the Australian calendar year. Over my 45 plus years of teaching I have witnessed the resurgence of observation of Anzac services in schools. Back in 1975, as a young high school Music and English teacher I was fresh from the moratorium marches of the Vietnam war years and not wanting to be seen to glorify war in my choice of songs for Anzac Day. So, it was “I Was Only Nineteen” rather than the more patriotic traditional choices. Emphasising the futility, rather than the glory, of war.
Nevertheless, in our family – like so many Australian families – we have our own WW1 story; that of my great uncle Sam’s untimely death at Passchendaele, Belgium on 17 October 1917.
Samuel Vaughan Selby was a dentist, working at rebuilding soldiers’ destroyed faces after shelling. He received a white feather which shamed him into direct combat on the battlefield where he was killed on his first sortie.
Today I was sorting through music in my music room when I serendipitously stumbled on two pieces of old family music.
One was great uncle Sam’s - a work for violin and piano. He never returned home to play his violin again.
The other was one of my grandmother’s piano pieces, purchased when she was studying piano in London, after winning a place at the prestigious Royal College of Music. At the start of the war, her father sent her a cable to tell her to come home immediately as it was no longer safe to stay. Her performance career was cut short, and she returned to Perth to work as a piano teacher for the rest of her 84 years. My grandmother was Samuel Selby’s sister.
So here, on my bookshelf, are two volumes of music, each representing music silenced by war.
Where are the songs about that?
Drama Tuesday - First Voice
/How do you teach Theatre History?
One of the perennial problems about fully developed drama education courses is finding ways of engaging students with the drama and theatre of other times and places. We became frustrated with the usual approaches – finding a television documentary and slapping students down in front of 60 minutes. All that sort of teaching encourages is passive engagement. The students who are interested focus; the rest get bored quickly.
Of course, you can ask students to take notes – or fill in a work sheet – but it is still deadly theatre (to steal a term from Peter Brook). The other approach is to send students off to the Library or to do Google searches. The result is always skewed or idiosyncratic viewpoints of a particular author and the perennial problem of “cut and paste”. Where is the development of critical thinking that promotes questioning and, above all, linking to the student’s own practice.
Of all the reasons that we ask students to consider drama of other times and places, is the hope that they will take ideas from the long trajectory of drama and theatre over time and place and apply ideas to their own drama making. It must not be drama knowledge for drama knowledge’s sake.
In my drama teacher education classes at Murdoch University, the concept of these introductions in First Voice were developed into workshops where students took on the roles of, for example, making the journey to Epidaurus for the Festival of Asclipios.
The aim – as always in my drama teaching – is to embody knowledge and learning.
Drama Tuesday - Drama Australia Creating Community
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To subscribe to Drama Australia publications
Drama Australia AdministratorPO Box 1205, Milton, QLD 4064. AUSTRALIA
Ph: +61 7 3009 0664
Fax: +61 3009 0668
email: admin@dramaaustralia.org.au
It’s always exciting when Drama Australia publishes ADEM, the Australian Drama Education Magazine. ADEM sits alongside the fully referred NJ - Drama Australia Journal. It is designed to create community and share news.
This themed edition celebrates 10 years since the publication of Drama Australia’s Acting Green Guidelines (2011) – https://dramaaustralia.org.au/assets/files/Acting%20Green%20The%20case%20studies(1).pdf. ADEM calls for a timely revision and invites responses to a survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YQVK8G2) on ways of moving forward.
Drama Australia’s Acting Green guidelines were built on the understanding that sustainable drama and theatre practice and teaching about sustainability through drama are ways to directly involve students in understanding their connections with the natural environment, and the interdependence of systems that support life on Earth. They connect to the Australian Curriculum (ACARA)
The articles focused on Drama and Sustainability are a clear commitment to engaging with this key issue.
Eco-anxiety and Drama Education, Jo Raphael.
Unity in troubled times, Darcie Kane-Priestley, Emma McDonald, and Julia Prestia.
Two articles offer drama curriculum ideas based on children’s literature.
Susan Chapman writes about Drama giving voice to sustainability through an Arts immersion approach, exploring the novel Chelonia Green, Champion of Turtles (Mattingly, 2008).
Helen Sandercoe outlines a process drama based on ‘Circle’ by Jeannie Baker,
Learning about ecoscenography Tanja Beer.
Beyond the pandemic: Seeking sustainability in online drama education, Andrew Byrne, Susan Cooper, and Nick Waxman.
The final section provides 2021 Reflections from the State and Territory member Associations of Drama Australia.
In these times where the COVID-119 Pandemic has increased our sense of isolation, the value and need for a shared community of practice – as provided by Drama Australia and member associations – is essential and necessary.
Thank you Drama Australia for this latest initiative.
Thanks Dr Jo Raphael (Editor) and Danielle Hradsky (Associate Editor).
Music Monday - Using song cues for learning intervals.
/I’m sure that we have all used song cues in the learning and teaching of musical intervals (the difference in pitch between two sounds).
An understanding of intervals is crucial to our understanding of the shape of music, the structure of scales and chords and intune singing. Understanding intervals is also pretty important for passing music theory exams!
My earliest memory of using song cues was thinking the opening phrase of “My bonny lies over the ocean” to identify a major 6th as a child preparing for the aural component of AMEB piano exams.
During my teaching career I have created lists of song cues and used other teachers’ lists and suggestions too.
Recently a community of singing teachers I am part of was discussing the challenges of singing a perfect 4th. One member posted the following link as a comprehensive list of song cues for intervals. It was certainly one of the most comprehensive I had come across and so I share it with you. There seems to be a song for everyone on this list.
https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-chart-generator.html
Happy music teaching!
Music Monday - Welcome back to another year of music making.
/Here in Western Australia the music teaching community, refreshed after the 6-week hot summer break, turns its attention to the arrival of the omicron variant of Covid19.
For those of you reading from afar, WA has maintained until now a firmly closed border (a matter of vigorous political debate) and so we are only now experiencing the start of our own omicron wave.
After a relatively normal 2021 teaching year, teachers here are now joining the ongoing international and interstate discussions about the most suitable masks to wear while singing. Or whether performing groups in schools should be limited to single year cohorts to minimise potential viral spread within a school. Or whether choreography for the school musical can include body contact with another performer.
One of my singing students happily picked up a gig in a Perth Fringe Festival show this week after the original singer was sadly deemed a close contact of a positive case and forced into isolation. There are winners and losers at this time.
There is much uncertainty about how this semester will proceed in schools. Some disruption seems inevitable. I found yesterday’s all-day teaching in a mask very tiring. So did my students and teaching colleagues.
Our daughter in the USA has been doing this for two years. It feels odd to her to be not wearing a mask now.
News from interstate suggests that omicron might be receding. That is good news. But will another wave follow?
Right now, the questions outnumber the answers.
To end on a completely different note, so many of us were saddened to learn of American actress Betty White’s passing on 31st December 2021. Did you know that in her early career she also sang? Take a listen to this:
Enjoy your day!
Drama Tuesday - Identification
/The Experience of Humanity
Key to the experience of drama – as an audience member but also as an actor and director – is our capacity to empathetically identify with characters and situations in drama.
That doesn’t mean that we have to “Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war” in bloody assassination or become a husband and wife team intent on regicide or be an abandoned fourteen year old swallowing a potion to fake death when abandoned by her lover. But, when we experience drama we share some of the emotion and thinking. We laugh or cry; our senses and emotions work in overload.
This is a tricky issue (particularly for some parents and community members) who fret at the idea of children confronting issues and emotions – and fear of losing control.
But at its heart identification is the concept of recognising that drama is experiencing the shared experiences of being human. Drama, particularly great and lasting drama, works directly on our senses of seeing and hearing. It impacts on our focus and attention , our thinking and emotions. It registers with us somatically, our breathing rates, our postures, our muscles. All of this physical action is directed towards the mental and emotional understanding of people (who could be like us, or not) in situations and relationships (that we can imaginatively enter).
As much as I can say, rationally, that what I am experiencing in drama is just an actor representing action symbolically, the significance lies in the connection with the human experience of others because I am standing in their shoes as if it were happening to me.
To put it another way, identification in drama is the moment that has the Ah Ha! impact.
All of this is preamble for the following. An analogous experience in literature – reminding us of the connection between the arts
In a lifetime of reading, a new experience.
I turned page 357 of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and find for the first time a fictional representation of Nannup.
My parents Nannup wedding 1949
Nannup is my mother’s heart land. She grew in this South West Western Australian timber town. In school she won the prize as Dux of Grade 7 when she was 12. She lived with her mother Win and sister Carmel and brother Francis. After her death we found that she was born out of wedlock. (See the investigation by our Historian/Doctor son, Phillip, for that story.)
The black and white photo of her wedding shows her outside the wooden church with my father, Richard (mostly known as Dick). In summers camping at Dunsborough we would make family pilgrimages to Nannup – in scalding heat, of course. It is heart land for me too. Songline contours on my soul.
It is therefore strange to finally come across a fictional telling of Nannup.
