Acting Technique

Ensembles! It’s not about creating a divide about the leads and the chorus, it’s about a collection of parts that come together as a whole. Each element works in relation to the other. A production...

Breathing is more than just the inhale and the exhale. This is especially true for actors. As a beginning actor, the relationship between you and your breath might be exactly the same as in...

When young actors look for a monologue, sometimes their first stop is the movies. There are so many monologue moments available on YouTube these days, and certainly, some of those moments are...

Ideally, we want students to study characters and bring them to life through scene work. But what if you have students who have been away during rehearsals and you need a related activity for them...

Theatre in the classroom is more than lines, scripts, and stages. It’s about building a community. A strong ensemble creates a brave space for students to explore, take risks, and develop their own...

If you’ve ever had a student ask, “Am I ever going to use this improv stuff in real life?” the answer is yes — we use improvisation skills all the time outside of the drama classroom. Improv isn’t...

Does this sound familiar: A student auditions for a play. That student is cast. Halfway through the rehearsal process they either start missing rehearsals because of “other commitments” or drop the...

Abstract theatre focuses on representing themes, ideas, situations, and emotions in a visual, stylized, symbolic way, rather than acting them out realistically. Using stylized physicality, students...

If you’ve got a large group of drama students but not a lot of time, try these two quick full-class tableau exercises. Students will work together to create full-class tableau scenes as fast as...

This warm-up game is a variation of the game “Numbered Tableaux”. It’s similar to the camp game “Chicken in the Hen House,” but adjusted to be safer for the drama classroom, and focused on creating...

Tableau is a fantastic introductory theatre topic for middle schoolers. The word “tableau” comes from the phrase tableau vivant, or “living picture.” In tableau, students use their bodies and...

By this point, students will have learned about and practiced miming preparatory skills (including stillness, focus, and visualization), portraying items of different weights, and interacting with...

We’ve all seen the classic “mime stuck behind an invisible wall” routine, and when you mention miming to students, typically they’ll immediately start waving their hands around in that fashion....

In our previous Middle School Miming article, students explored using their hands and arms to maneuver invisible objects of various sizes around a circle. Now, we’re adding moving throughout the...

Students new to mime will often just start moving their hands haphazardly, like an item magically appeared in their hand out of thin air. But one of the ways a mimed object is made “real” is by...

Miming is a great topic for middle school drama students. The art of miming uses the actors’ bodies and imaginations to tell a story, without using their voices. It’s all about “making the unreal,...

It’s common for young or beginning drama students to get wiggly or fidgety onstage, especially if they’re part of the ensemble or not speaking, singing, or dancing at that moment. It’s as though...

There are many different ways to analyze a scene for classroom study or performance: verbing, marking up the script, identifying subtext, making lists, and more. Some of these methods are easy and...