Nonverbal Articles for Drama Teachers

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,...

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...

It’s easy for students to get hyper-focused on their lines when they’re working on a scene or on a show – counting how many lines they have, memorizing the lines, knowing what order the lines come...

What is a signature gesture? It’s a nonverbal, repeated movement your character is known for, that you perform in a particular way that is unique and identifiable. Common, well-known gestures...

Emotional Baggage. We all have it but how do we deal with it? The characters within this one-act dramedy by Lindsay Price carry theirs with them at all times. They convey their stories and...

How do we communicate without words? We communicate without words every day. A frown and crossed arms communicates a clear message, as does a nod, wink, or a “come here” gesture. There’s the...

Communication is not just what we say – nonverbal actions play a huge part as well. How we stand, gesture, make eye contact, all of these physical choices communicate. Use this nonverbal exercise...

This week we spread the love for Emotional Baggage by Lindsay Price. Recorded live in a turn of the century train station.