Trippingly on the Tongue - Year 9 English and Drama

Aims:

• To engage with the play as a 'play' rather than as written text
• To consider multiple interpretations of the play
• To explore character motivation and interaction

Thematic ideas:

• Characters speak from their thoughts, feelings and circumstances.
• Different character intention would lead to different ways of performing a scene.
• Characters don’t come in as a clean slate, they respond to how other characters are speaking/feeling as well as what they say.

Process:

A number of drama classes are run around the above themes. They covered:

• Aspects of the particular play, major themes and ideas.
• Character intention: students improvised around the way in which having different thoughts and feelings changes the way we speak. They used duplicate actors to identify thoughts during the process of acting a scene.
• Character interaction: students improvised responding with the same script to different approaches.

Web product:

• Collaboratively made website exploring the themes through creating multiple videos.

Case Study 1 -  English, Twelfth Night, Haggerston School:

• In groups, students were asked to choose scenes from the play that they had enjoyed. As a class they decided on a scene for each group so that no scene was duplicated. They were asked to consider the intention of the first character in the scene, and how others would respond. Having learned the words, they performed and videoed three different takes of the same scene, editing them and putting them on a web page. Each group was also asked to write out a synopsis of the story of what happened between the last group’s scene and their own.

Case Study 2 -  Drama, Macbeth, Clapton School:

• Groups of students were asked to design a web page that included video. They were to consider not only performing the scene, but also to find ways of incorporating the characters' thoughts. Groups dealt with this differently. One group produced five videos - two containing the thoughts of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before the scene, one central video was the scene itself, and the final two contained the character's thoughts after the scene. Another group split their scene up into three parts, giving a different interpretation to each part, and adding words onto the webpage describing the differences.