More fun to be had at OKTC T.A.G.!  We just had our big orientation weekend at OKTC and it was so great to see all the kids and families again and get caught up.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we did our Mime & Tableau class.  Last year’s class was taught by Art Fidler, and I made sure to take tons of notes during his class!  So this year I taught the class using Art’s lesson plan and the kids really seemed to like it.  I also added some techniques that I learned in stage combat class!   It’s always fun when I can add combat to my classes, ha ha!  I had the kids do a push/pull exercise that I learned in New York from either Jared or Kyle, which was really fun.  We also used the script book from Peter and the Starcatcher as a reference for tableaux that the kids created — one of my favourite Broadway shows!!

This weekend was what I always think of as the “boring class” — Theatre Terms & Etiquette.  Last year it was mostly a sit-around-and-read class, which the kids were ok with, but they got pretty antsy by the end of the class.  And while it’s all important stuff to learn, I didn’t want to do another sit-around-and-read class!  But again… Art to the rescue!  He gave me some great ideas for how to make the class more active.  So I’ll share it with you!

Act It Out!

This is a fun game to use if you have a bunch of rules or guidelines to learn.  Divide the kids into small groups (3-4 kids per group) and give each group a rule to act out.  They can either act out the rule as it is stated OR act out the opposite of the rule and show the group what not to do!  Give them a time limit to figure out how they’ll show it, then have each group perform. Then the other groups have to guess what the rule is that was just acted out.  Usually the guesses are just as useful to talk about as the actual rule!

If you’re interested in learning some more about Mime & Tableau, or Theatre Terms & Etiquette, here are some useful links!

• Tableau – http://dramaresource.com/strategies/tableaux
• How to Mime – http://www.wikihow.com/Mime
• Stage areas – http://redbirdstudio.com/AWOL/stage.html
• Actor postions – http://www.knowitall.org/artopia/theater/backstage/greenroom/greenroom.html
• Theatre terms wordsearch – http://library.thinkquest.org/5291/wsearch.html
• Theatre vocabulary (there are lots out there but this one is pretty thorough!) – http://www.kqed.org/assets/pdf/arts/programs/spark/theatervocab.pdf

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