Unit 2:
Applying Ensemble Drama
Pedagogy to Teaching Literature
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed (Star Publishing, 2018) edited by Ken Mizusawa
The NIE research team collaborated with Mr Ken Mizusawa to integrate ensemble drama pedagogy into the teaching of Singapore drama from the play anthology cum lower secondary textbook he edited,
"Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed."
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​The purpose of this unit was to:
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1. Apply ensemble drama pedagogy to help socially situate the plays in the students’ lived experiences, thus allowing them to engage with them in a culturally and socially relevant manner;
2. Increase the teacher participants’ practical understanding and working knowledge of ensemble drama pedagogy in the Literature classroom and how it can enhance students’ development of literary analysis and appreciation of dramatic texts; and
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3. Understand how ensemble drama pedagogy can facilitate cosmopolitan dispositions such as hospitality and empathy in the Literature classroom.
This unit culminated in an inter-school ensemble drama workshop with students from all the participating schools.
Suggested Activities for Ensemble Drama Pedagogy by Ken Mizusawa
Ensemble Drama
Routine :
Table Reading
Learning Objectives:
1. To set a routine of collaborative meaning-making between students;
2. To open up the multiple possibilities for making meaning with a dramatic text, because depending on how you read aloud/perform it, it changes meaning.
A table reading in educational drama is not like a group of actors coming together to read assigned parts. Instead, it is about taking turns to take on different roles to generate different meanings about a text.
The aim is to understand there are many possibilities for reading and interpreting characters based on the decisions each person makes instinctively in reading a character’s lines in a scene.
This activity achieves a balance between close reading (paying attention to how the text can be read on the page) and performance (paying attention to how the text can be read onstage) without demanding too much from the students in terms of staging drama.
How to Implement?
In small groups, have students take turns at reading different roles in a scene.
Give them freedom to experiment. Have male students read female roles and vice versa.
Get students to pay attention to interesting and unexpected ways of reading a character. Encourage a spirit of exploration and improvisation.
Pay attention to things like speed and pauses, volume, pronunciation, tone.
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Ensemble Drama Activity 1:
Choral Performance of Monologues
Learning Objectives:
1. Facilitate collaborative meaning-making;
2. Enhance appreciation of dramatic text as lived experience from the perspective of the character, not just words on paper.
Teachers can apply this strategy to introduce students to any particular monologue in a given play via performances. Instead of getting one student to read an entire monologue, break the class up into groups to examine its many dimensions and complexities together.
The aim is to get a group working collectively as a chorus to explore how a monologue can be performed employing a plurality of voices to bring out different emotions, inner conflict and key concerns of character.
How to implement:
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APPROACH 1: Performing the Text as an Ensemble.
1. In groups, get students to individually highlight key words and phrases in the chosen monologue.
2. One student reads the text first (as the “guiding voice” of the group), and everyone else joins in to read those words/phrases they have highlighted, amplifying them as a chorus.
3. Different students can take turns during the monologue to be the “guiding voice”.
4. Encourage the groups to read the monologue more than once together.
5, Get students to observe any interesting choices of reading and interpreting the text as they emerge through performance.
5. Get students to tag these observations with words that describe impressions and emotional states of characters.
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APPROACH 2: Modifying the Text as an Ensemble
1. See “Ensemble Drama Routine” for basic set-up of Table Reading.
2. Now, encourage students to venture further by modifying the text with other voices when the “guiding voice” (main reader) is reading the monologue aloud.
3. Students can add inner voices, repeat certain words and phrases like echoes, and interrogate the character with questions to make the subtext more explicit. These are ways of modifying the original text by adding new text so as to amplify and extend the meaning.
[Extension]:
Consider adding gestures and movement to the performance.
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APPROACH 3: Soundscape
A soundscape is a collage of voices in which lines are allowed to overlap creating a wall of noise. This can be used to amplify dramatic tension.
It can be used integrated into a monologue or used in the background to a monologue to generate mood and atmosphere.
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Further References from Structuring Drama Work: 100 Key Conventions for Theatre and Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2015) by Jonothan Neelands and Tony Goode
[p.25] Role-on-the-wall
[p.137] Thought Shower
[p.40] Everywoman
[p.41] Good angel/bad angel
[p.115] Choral Speak
[p.107] Soundscape
Ensemble Drama Activity 2:
Tableau
Learning Objectives:
1. Facilitate collaborative meaning-making;
2. Enhance appreciation of dramatic text as filled with stage images, not just words on paper.
A tableau is a still image that participants create with their bodies. Participants can create images that are literal or abstract. The point is to capture a key idea/moment as single silent image that can be interpreted creatively and critically by others.
Teachers can apply this convention to provoke students to stop and think more deeply
about pivotal events in a text or to concretize central themes as images.
In a tableau, students are suspending movement so as to allow for sustained interpretations, examinations and re-imaginings of key ideas/moments to occur.
Hence, it can be thought of as a close reading strategy.
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How to implement:
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APPROACH 1: Literal stage images.
Create a tableau based on a key moment in a scene or a series of three images to represent the beginning, middle and end of a scene.
Make use of gesture, stillness and Thought Tracking (Neelands & Goode, 2015) to explain what they are thinking on demand to properly enhance the image. .
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APPROACH 2: Poetic/Abstract stage images.
Students can try to capture emotions, conflict and ideas in a play in abstract and symbolic form. Students can choose to re-present the inner conflict of characters or overarching themes that define the play.
Contrasting or sequence of tableaus can be employed to show various aspects of an inner struggle or evolving nature of a theme.
APPROACH 3: Narrative Progression via Tableaus (Beginning, Middle and End)
Teachers and/or students can create three tableaus to represent the beginning, middle and end of a scene or the play as a whole.
In different groups, students could create the narrative trajectory and/or development of different characters in a play so they can be compared and contrasted.
Teachers can ask students to track changes in the state of mind/perspective of characters via a sequence of tableaus.
Teachers can also consider getting students to stage key moments of dramatic tension using tableaus.
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Further References from Structuring Drama Work: 100 Key Conventions for Theatre and Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2015) by Jonothan Neelands and Tony Goode
[p.25] Role-on-the-wall
[p.28] Still-image
[p.122] Group Sculpture
[p.138] Thought Tracking
Ensemble Drama Activity 3:
Exploring Drama through Transmediation
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Learning Objectives:
1. To engage students with various forms of media to supplement the students’ understanding and engagement with the plays.
APPROACH 1: Meme-Making and GIF-Making (Image and Text)
Teachers can leverage on the performative and participatory nature of new media to make important discoveries and statements about a dramatic text and its performative and participatory nature via transmediation. New media practices allow students to deconstruct and remix a text using established text forms such as memes and GIFs for ironic and indeed, dramatic effect.
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Students will be tasked with selecting key lines or situations from the play and reinventing and 'staging' then as memes or GIFs using readily available online generators such as:
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Meme maker: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator
Meme maker: https://makeameme.org/
GIF maker: https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker
GIF maker: https://imgflip.com/gif-maker
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Students can create or appropriate still/moving images to generate their own memes and GIFs to make their own statement about the text thereby making a connection between their everyday digital practices and the study of drama in Literature.
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Making memes is subversive and can help unearth the subtext of drama. It will also aid students in remembering key moments and quotes from the text for examination purposes.
APPROACH 2: Writing and Representing in Role
Students can engage in writing and representing tasks in role. They can write a personal letter in role as one of the characters (See Neelands & Goode, 2015, p.17 & p.130).
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They can write a newspaper article about a key event in the play as a journalist. They can produce a storyboard in the role of a filmmaker adapting the play for the screen.
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Allow the students to make critical and creative choices while in role to maximise learning via dramatic engagement.
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APPROACH 3: Generating Dialogue through Social Media
Students in groups can create a social media account of a character in a play and engage in promoting their online identity via posts and hashtags.
Students in role as other characters can then respond to the posts via comments generating online dialogue between characters.
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For inspiration, check out this new work created by Eugene Tan and Lee Shu Yu, titled “@thisisemeraldgirl”, imagining the granddaughter of Stella Kon’s Emily from the monodrama, Emily of Emerald Hill, on social media.
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Further References from Structuring Drama Work: 100 Key Conventions for Theatre and Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2015) by Jonothan Neelands and Tony Goode
[p.17] Diaries, letters, journals, messages
[p.50] Reportage
[p.68] Caption-making [reference]
[p.130] Postbox