Tableaux

Dear Drama Diary,

Today was my very first drama class at Brock.  Can you believe it?  I’m taking drama!  I started out feeling very nervous.  You know how I can get.  I’m always scared of new things. But guess what?  It was great! I actually enjoyed myself. 

We learned about this wonderful drama strategy called tableaux.  A tableau is when people make a still picture with their bodies.  You have to be absolutely silent… you can’t even whisper!  It is used to represent a specific scene, theme, or important moment in a narrative.   The idea is to communicate the meaning of a concept using facial expressions, body language, and gestures instead of words. 

 We started by listening to a story.  The title was Mortimer and it was written by Robert Munsch (one of my favourite authors!)  When we reached an important part, we would stop reading and, as a small group, create a tableau to depict our interpretation of that moment in the book.  We had to pick our poses carefully and act absolutely still like statues.  I liked it a lot because we got to use details from the story AND our imaginations.  How cool is that?!

 What I loved most about working with tableaux was the way that they allowed us to combine drama with another subject area—language.  In this case, the story Mortimer acted as the merger between the two subjects, but do you know what I was thinking?  We could use tableaux in other subjects, too!  What about social studies?  We could make tableaux about heritage and identity, roles and responsibilities, early societies, or Canada’s interaction with the global community.

I hope drama continues to be such a terrific class.  I will try to learn as many new strategies as I can. 

Goodnight Drama Diary,

See you soon,

V