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This lesson focuses on symbolism by investigating The Manifesto of Symbolism by Jean Moreas to help inspire students to write their own short manifestos.

This lesson introduces the characteristics of Dadaism, through Ubu Roi, Dadaism manifestos, Voltaire, and Dada art. Students will learn how to write a Dada poem of their own.

This lesson looks at Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism, Atraud's Theatre of Cruelty, and the game of Exquisite Corpse. Students will create their own short surrealist play.

This lesson investigates expressionist theatre and compare to the other movements discussed thus far. Using O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, students will conduct deep analysis on a scene.

This lesson enters the last and final -ism for the unit, with a focus on five iconic absurdist playwrights: Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and Albee.

This project combines creativity with analytical thought as students connect ideas and concepts with their imagination in order to create a theme park that embodies all five of the “isms” we’ve covered: symbolism, Dadaism, surrealism, expressionism, and absurdism.

This lesson aims to encourage students to take risks and allay fear.

This lesson encourages students to embrace failure as a positive aspect rather than negative.

This lesson allows students to practice and apply attributes of confidence.

This lesson has students identify and have self-awareness of positive and negative speak.

Students will learn to break free of academia’s stringent MLA formatting and “proper” speech patterns, while recognizing their own code-switching, to capture authentic and natural rhythms to match the speech patterns of their friends, families, and community.

Students will build upon the Overheard Dialogue lesson to write a first draft of an authentic, decolonized monologue that speaks to their interests and voice.

Students will use a workshop process to build upon the first draft of their monologue and write a second, stronger draft of their monologue.

In this unit, students will create and perform an abstract theatre scene. Abstract is a genre that does not rely on realism and deliberately breaks the rules of a given form. In the case of theatre, this refers to the commonly presented rules of performance, acting, and the relationship with the audience. Movement is often stylized and symbolic. Ideas and themes are expressed visually and aurally with little dialogue using music, lights, costumes, and props.

In this lesson, students will participate in several activities that will help them devise, create, and rehearse movement that can be used in abstract scenes. They will practice and demonstrate their understanding of blocking and physicality by being able to add and execute movement in their abstract scene.

In this lesson, students will spend time rehearsing their abstract scenes. They will also practice and demonstrate movement skills such as facial expression, posture, gesture control, and balance.

In this lesson, students will spend time rehearsing their abstract scenes. They will have an opportunity to both perform for their peers and to evaluate another group’s abstract scene using the performance rubric.

Students will perform their abstract scenes for classes who have been invited to observe.

This Indigenous Storytelling unit is brought to you in a different format than a traditional lesson plan. It uses a learning circle format. It was developed by Allison Green, a member of the Algonquin Band of Mattawa, Ontario.

There is a lot in this unit, so perhaps you’ll just want to end with the quiz and reflection. However, if you want a performance activity to end the unit, consider this Greek monologue activity.