Communication Articles for Drama Teachers

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...

Listening is an important skill in any classroom, but it’s especially important in the drama classroom. From classroom instruction, to game directions, to focusing on their fellow performers on...

Blind Robot is the ultimate verbal communication game. It requires players to CLEARLY communicate verbal commands to a “robot.” The robot then has to physically interpret those instructions in a...

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...

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,...

Welcome to our video series, Calling All Theatre Teachers! In this series we’re going to answer questions that drama teachers have about stepping into a theatre program. QUESTION: How do I deal...

Having additional personnel working on a school production can be incredibly helpful. Co-director, associate director, assistant director, director’s assistant, artistic associate — they’re all...

Something teachers notice frequently when working with middle school students is that when the students are performing a two-person scene onstage, they tend to turn their bodies directly towards...

The following exercise gives students the opportunity to explore different ways of approaching and performing a two-person scene, using two different levels of volume: only whispering and shouting....

Clear relationships onstage make characters’ interactions that much more interesting and engaging for the audience. The audience needs to know immediately how one character relates to another. No...

Hearing is a passive, physical act of using the ears to perceive sounds. You can hear without understanding or acknowledging the sounds. Listening, conversely, is an active, internal behaviour,...

The following exercise, Lipdub, brings together observation, critical thinking, scene writing, and vocal performance. As well, it’s a lot of fun! Lipdubs are commonly seen on YouTube as musical...

Keeping students actively engaged while teaching via distance learning can be frustrating at times. It can be more difficult for students to focus in a distance learning situation than in a...

The exercises listed below can be adapted to distance and online learning opportunities. Students work individually (rather than with partners or in groups). Group work and discussions can be...