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Students use their Actor’s Homework Sheet to create a personal word list to explore their character. They will also identify how they will use voice and body to bring their character to life. Finally, students review character objective and tactics in order to create an objective statement with three active tactics they will use with their monologue.

Students will dissect, analyze, and color code punctuation examples. Students will use physical movement that is tied to specific punctuation to help them explore how it can communicate meaning in the text. Students will then apply this and analyze their monologue by examining the punctuation.

Students will demonstrate their understanding of textual analysis, painting with words and imagery, creating a character, and preparing a monologue by performing a Shakespearean monologue and reflecting on their experience.

Students will take a memorization quiz and perform for their peers. Students will also critique each other based on what they have worked on during this unit.

Students explore and play with Laban’s Efforts, then select efforts to use in their monologue.

Students will review how to use stage pictures that communicate character, story, and emotion to help them create appropriate blocking for their performance. Students will create an appropriate focus for their character to look at while performing their monologue.

Students will identify and notate existing blocking for their scenes. They will also walk through each section beat by beat and notate further blocking.

In this lesson, students will create their own solo performance piece called “I Am From” and explore the different ways to tell a story through self-expression. This allows students to think about who they are and how they can communicate themselves theatrically. In African theatre, there are many ways to tell a story; this poem template allows the student to answer specific questions that will transform into a solo monologue which will be used for a performance.

To apply memorization techniques as part of the goal of a staged scene with specific, dynamic blocking and three-dimensional characters. This lesson will focus on practicing a variety of memorization techniques.

In this lesson, students will explore their character’s physicality. These exercises don’t require any assigned blocking, and students only have to memorize one line.

In this lesson, students will analyze characters, identify their perspectives, and demonstrate perspective taking by understanding their points of view.

The best way to introduce a concept is through activities. Students will participate in activities that ask them to make choices and observe the choices of others. They will be introduced to the definition of perspective taking and apply that definition through discussion and a theatrical moment group work activity.

In this lesson, students explore a variety of ways to create dynamic staging pictures when blocking a scene. They will discuss the results and reflect on whether or not what they’ve learned should be added to their blocking.

In this lesson, students will be introduced to a Black writer who explores racism through the absurdist form: Adrienne Kennedy.

Students will apply the color wheel to an understanding of theme and mood in scenic design.

In this lesson, students will be introduced to Sheila Callaghan and Caryl Churchill, who bring their own lens to the absurd. Students will then write their own scenes using the same meme that inspired Sheila Callaghan to write her play Women Laughing Alone with Salad.

Applying the concepts and skills they have acquired in this unit, students will analyze, design, then build a single, comprehensive miniature set inside of a shoebox (based on a song of their choosing).

In this lesson, students will move beyond the traditional origins of Theatre of the Absurd through two different playwrights: Vaclav Havel (Audience) and Issam Abdel-Masih Mahfouz (The Dictator), both of whom write about environments where power has created a distorted reality. Students will be introduced to these playwrights and then write their own version of a distorted reality.

In this lesson, students will practice identifying the perspective of others. They will think about all the elements that go into someone’s perspective (e.g., background, experience, traditions, preferences, circumstances).

For this project, students will create a scene in groups in which everyone is given a specific perspective. Each student must present a character from their provided perspective.