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DRAMA IN A SHOEBOX
Stepping into Sustainable Drama & Theatre Practice
Presented by Jo Raphael and Meg Upton
Introduction: What is Acting Green?
Drama Australia believes that sustainable drama and theatre practice, and teaching about sustainability
through drama are ways to directly involve students in understanding their connections with their
environment and their interconnectedness in the world. Drama Australia believes it is important that its
members and member organisations address issues of sustainability in the classroom and this document
serves to guide and support classroom practice and performance making – Acting Green, November 2011
Today’s workshop is drawn from key guidelines in the new Drama Australia Acting Green
document. The guidelines are a response to our times, the advent of a new Australian
Curriculum, and ways of generating links between education and industry.
lActing Green is concerned with:
 Teaching sustainability through drama
 Sustainable Drama and Theatre Practice
 Thinking Green
 Speaking Green
 Acting Green
The workshop is designed to explore guidelines into practice.
Further…
The workshop is aimed at addressing the Australian Curriculum cross curricular imperatives.
These were at the forefront in our thinking when we constructed the workshop and the broader
projects that could be generated in the classroom and educational communities.
 Indigenous perspectives
 Asian connections
 Sustainability – environmental and social/cultural
Initial considerations: What do we invest with meaning and value?
If one end of the room is worth ten and the other zero stand in the place that you believe reflects
how important the following things are:
Your mum/dad/sister/brother, friends, latest mobile phone, good marks, loads of
money, the latest clothes, comfortable shoes, holidays, good coffee, respecting
others, fresh air, clean water, cheap electricity,
This list can be added to depending on your students and your context
They can also be simplified depending on the age of the students
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Other ways that the idea of VALUE could be explored
Mind Map
 In small groups students create a mind map on a large piece of recycled paper that has
WHAT I VALUE in the middle – generate bubbles, arrows, and links – share this
Post it
 In small groups of five or six. Each person writes on a post-it note something they value
and stick it on their body
 As a small group they look at what has been written then decide, as a group to the order
of value the and then stand in that order 1-5 or 1-6
 Share ideas and thoughts about the choices made and what we consider to be VALUABLE
Why do we want to explore what is valuable?
If people VALUE things, then that often leads to tangible and visible action. In this project we are
exploring what people value in order to:
 To be mindful and aware of value on a number of levels
 In order to act people need to acquire an emotional investment in something; we
need to care about it
 In order to create drama and theatre or create action that matters we also need to
feel something.
The above exercise is a small taste of a potentially longer process drama whereby you establish
what each student values and invests in, cares about and doesn’t want to lose
The Shoe Boxes
Resources – a number of different sized shoe boxes provided by you or brought to school by the
students.
 Why a shoe box? Why have we chosen that? What does a shoebox mean to each person?
 Discuss the ‘model’ shoebox – we decoupaged the shoebox with junk mail.
 How else might it be covered? What would be symbolic, ironic, metaphoric?
 Will it be created in Arts? Who will choose what goes in it?
 Recycled items, music, excerpts from novels, poems and plays, Youtube URLs, an element
 Hand out the shoe boxes to the groups and they have a few minutes to explore their box.
 In these shoe boxes we placed; photos, an element, newspaper text, recycled bottle,
bubble wrap, plastic bag, toilet roll, paper bag, disposable cup
Playmaking ideas - using the shoebox stimulus as the basis for play making
Storytelling/Puppetry
Resources – plastic bags, drink cups, paper bags, toilet roll, black textas, masking tape, scissors,
string
 In pairs take an item each and create a simple puppet
 Bring the puppet to life, think about how it sees the world, how it feels, how it moves,
and spend some time allowing this to happen
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Create a little back story for your puppet
You could have the students consider aspects of Theatre of the Absurd – nonsensical,
pause, the unexpected
Introduce your ‘puppet’ item to the other puppets and allow them to interact
This could be developed into a short performance piece and presented to the class
Chorus work
Resources: Powerpoint of projected images that show aspects of the environment and the world
– water, fire, wind, air, pollution, animals, plant life – they should provoke and offer up ideas for
SOUND
 Voice crescendo warm up as a beginning – in circle, begin with feet, then add an ahhh
sound which grows, arms lift and then you all reach crescendo and let the breath go – you
can repeat this a few times
 As a whole group stand facing the screen
 Look at the projected and begin to create a sound that you feel represents or could exist
in that image
 Group works simultaneously
 Repeat for the rest of the images (4 is good for contrast and focus and for building a
SOUND VOCABULARY)
What is a Chorus?
 What is a chorus and what is the function of a chorus?
 Choruses can be found in Noh Theatre, Indigenous story telling, and Greek Theatre
 Their role is to comment, narrate, describe, advise, lament, question, berate
 A Chorus of the Elders of the Earth – this lends itself to thinking about creatures or spirits
or ghosts or other types of Elders
 A Chorus of the Children of the Earth – this creates a whole thinking around inheritance,
responsibility
Creating a Chorus performance
 Select an image from the shoe box (it may be one of the ones already used)
 Place the image in view of the group and then each group member creates a sound in
response
 Teach each other your sounds so that you now have a group sound vocabulary.
 This is the basis of your Chorus Work
 Consider how you can manipulate the sound – in unison, as a round or canon, in a call and
response, as individual voices, in repetition
 Decide on what the sound MEANS – does is narrate or describe? What is the feeling you
are trying to get across?
 Present your final vocal chorus to the class and discuss
Heightened Language
 Choose one of the articles in the shoe box and select a short piece of text from it – a
phrase, a headline, one word each
 Incorporate this into your soundscape – word at a time, chanted, play with ideas – think
about impact and meaning.
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Extensions to this exercise: MOVEMENT, GESTURE AND SPACE
 Consider how you could choreograph movement and gesture to the soundscape
 You could move together in unison with gesture, change direction, use levels, mirroring,
stillness
 How will you position the audience – in the round, end on, traverse, found?
Developing the Performance
Past, Present, Future – A feeling of Hope
As educators we need to leave our students feeling optimistic and able to consider that they can
be agents of change. Ask students to:
o Identify from your shoebox stimuli an environmental issues that is of concern
o Develop a Scene One – this depicts how humanity got to this point
o Develop a Scene Two – this is a leap into the future (10, 20, 50, 100 years plus) to a time
when this problem has been turned around so it no longer is a problem – finding or
thinking about solutions
o Something has happened to turn the problem around – what might that be?
o Human behaviour, technology, publicity, inspired leadership, resources have been
exhausted
o Use only the items in the shoebox as props, puppets etc or other found and recycled items
o Consider how to use space to create and actor audience relationship that maximizes the
ideas eg. traverse, thrust, in the round, found, end on
o Consider the time of day and how it might be lit – daylight, LED torches
Presenting the performance
In the workshop today you are asked to present your piece using the theatrical style of
Documentary Theatre with possibly aspects of the conventions of Epic Theatre).
Research and discussion around what Documentary Theatre is will scaffold the process.
Some suggested choices using the conventions of Documentary Theatre are:
o A slideshow with a presenter/narrator
o Documentary with a narrator who could incorporate interviews with experts,
o An animated flow chart that morphs and flows with narration either outside or from
within
o A moving museum exhibit with a guide and the audience walks through
Maintaining the hope and developing action:
What can students do in real life to take action?
Using the three key guidelines form Acting Green:
o Thinking – about everyday living practices and acting on it – recycling, composting,
walking
o Speaking – to others about their own living practices, creating performances to show
others ways of considering and actively looking after the world
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o Acting – creating an awareness campaign, advocating for change in their school, leading
the change by presenting and implementing projects, consciously considering a carbon
footprint when creating theatre and performance
Creating an archive/artefact from today’s performances
The shoeboxes have enormous scope. What will happen to them when your class has completed
their project? Our thoughts were that they could become an archive or time capsule that is
handed on to other classes. Each class could provide a note/comment/advice after their own
work and then place it in the box:
o Write a message for the next users of the box
o Include your group’s first names, the date and a brief description of the performance
choices you made around the stimulus material
Other ways to create/generate an archive or artefact:
Writing a poem, a rap song, taking photos, recording people’s voices, writing a letter, making a
collage, generating a digital recording of the performance
Other extended drama activities that could be used to explore the issues of Drama and
Sustainability:
o Mask work – made from recycled materials
o Tableaux
o Story telling
o Song – opera, rap, musical theatre
o Script writing – naturalistic scenes of moments in time
o Movement or Dance – use of music
o Poetry – written by the students or sourced
o Prose from novels
o Play excerpts – contemporary, absurd, commedia etc
o Technology
Example: Tableaux – Discuss the images in the shoebox and what they might represent
 Captions – if you were to write a caption what would it be?
 Using the images in the shoebox, create a tableau or series of tableaux (3) with your
bodies that your group feels captures that image
 Decide how you will transition between the three tableaux (images) – morph, snap, travel,
ask audience to close their eyes, use sound.
 How might you add sound?
 Take photos and have students create a digital presentation, tagging and annotating the
images, passing them onto another group to reconstruct the story.
Jo Raphael and Meg Upton
December 2, 2011
Drama Victoria Conference - Encompass