IV

[MOCKLET REVIEWER]
FOUNDATIONS OF CREATIVE DRAMA & THEATER
PRODUCTION , DRAMATURGY AND AESTHETICS IN
THEATER CLASSICS
 HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF DRAMA
 Primitive
-rituals
 Ancient Greek
-rituals to god Dionysus
-dithyrambs, chorus
-Thespis – introduced actors
- Tragedy, comedy, stayr
-Aristotle – catharsis – purging
-Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles
- theatron
 Theater was borrowed or inspired by Greek
 For entertainment, for victories and funeral of known citizen
 Theater was used for games – ludi romani
 Attelan farce – famous comedy
 Plaustus, Terence, Seneca

 ROMAN DRAMA
-Fall of Roman empire, church became the authority
- Banned theater in the centers
- Included theater for catechesis during important church festivity
- Altar, churchyard, pageant wagons
- Actors – priest, later secular through the guilds

 MEDIEVAL PERIOD
- Mystery, miracle, morality
- Secular
- Spectacular (visual and aural effects)
- Reawakening – interest in the Greek classics thoughts and work
- Church division – Byzantine and Roman
- Discovery of Greek works
- Invention of printing press
- Reformation in the church rise in Protestantism

 RENAISSANCE
 Italian
- Embraced the Greek plays
- There were rules in writing a play
- Tragedies should teach moral lesson
- Later pastoral plays
- Intermezzi – opera
- Architecture
- Commedia del Arte
 Spanish
- Late in terms of theater
- Sacramental – combination of mystery and miracle and allegorical characters with morality themes.
- Lope de Vega
- Corrales, carrosa
 Elizabethan Theater
- Theater seen as unifying factor against the Catholics
- Players were protected by Royal
- Puritans saw theater as immoral
- Theater were erected outside the city
- John Heywood, Ben Johnson, Shakespeare
- Theater indoors and outdoors
  Humanism
- Interest in machine rather than God.
- Development of machines and workings of the human mind.
- Advancement of trade and industry
- Women were allowed to perform
- Sentimental comedy
- The prevailing viewpoint was humanity is good and only to heed an inner conscience to reap just rewards.

The Age of Reason

Enlightenment was a time that glorified the power to reason and analyze. This was the period of great
philosophical, scientific, technological, political, and religious revolutions. Rational empiricism slowly took over the
actors and playwrights began to look at what made the character’s decision in the story not by manipulation by the
supernatural.

Romanticism
Romantics felt that science is not adequate to explain to describe the full range of human experience and
their writing stressed instinct, intuition, and feeling. They explain the thing that is beyond rational explanation. This
movement was supported by Blaise Paschal which pointed out that “the heart has its reason that reason does not
know”. Romanticism gave rise to the Melodrama

Philippine Theater
a. Primitive - rituals
b. Spanish - religious
c. American - secular
d. Contemporary - ecletic

Philosophical Foundations of Creative Dramatics

 John Dewey’s “Experience and Education” (pragmatism)
- theory on “learning through experience”
- “literature and the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best
– a heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration”
- does not approve of improvisational approaches to drama
- recommended freely using dramatizations, plays and games in education
- the teacher becomes a facilitator

 Mortimer Adler’s “The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto”

- against Didactic method (humanism)
- education for all (not only vocational)
• All children are educable;
• Education is never completed in school or higher institutions of learning, but is a lifelong process of
maturity for all citizens;
• The primary cause of learning is the activity of the child's mind, which is not created by, but only
assisted by the teacher;
• Multiple types of learning and teaching must be utilized in education, not just teacher lecturing, or
telling;
• A student's preparation for earning a living is not the primary objective of schooling.

- The essence of the proposal involved three necessary types of learning and respective types of
teaching:knowing what, knowing how, and knowing why.
- The best education involves three
1. Knowledge in humanities, math and science
2. The development of skills
 3. Continual enlargement of understanding
- To acquire knowledge of the humanities, students can study drama and storytelling, particularly to assists
in teaching of history – Adler
- Experiential in approach “The best way to understand a play it to act in it out loud . . .Participants in
the creation of works of art is an important as viewing, listening to, and discussing them. All children should have
pleasurable experience”.

 Ira Shor’s “Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration” (critical theory)
- the teacher is not to initiate the young into existing culture, but instead to liberate the oppressed.
- the teacher should make the students aware of the existing power structure and enable them to develop
the critical faculties needed to address and overcome these structures.
- the teacher also should facilitate for the students to analyze how they contribute to this oppressive
structure.
- he accuses Adler as saboteur – he believes in the core of fixed values served only to strengthen the
conservative revolution
3 conspirational hoaxes cloaked politically conservative and fraudulent assault arts education.
1. Emphasis on career and vocational education took valuable time for the arts and made liberal arts less accessible.
2. Literary crises and the back-to-the-basics movements and the test score went up and “barbaric cutting” of the arts
3. Students cannot select their own course.Shor sees as promoting equity and empowerment is one that provides
ample time for “intuition, imagination and art-making”. Together with Paulo Friere they were the exponents of
critical philosophy and co-wrote the Pedagogy of Liberation Augusto Boal based his theater exercises on their
philosophy

1990’s Jonathan Kozol view that “educational reform is not possible until the economic reconstruction of
the school takes place”. In destitute schools there is a strong emphasis on high scores that measures only minimal
skills. Students who were not good in class activity performed well when they are tapped to perform on stage.
This surprise us. Shelby Wolf shows how she used theater in teaching students who had difficulty in identifying
punctuation marks. Caine and Caine shows how theater can be used as substitute for gangs – belongingness,
expression, aggression, projection etc. “Our natural mental maps, seem to be at the heart of thematic teaching. That
same memory system is engaged when use stories, metaphors, celebrations, imagery and music, all of which are
powerful tools for brain-based learning”.
The use of theater in class ultimately focuses on the learner than the teacher. The teacher facilitates the
class and help in achieving the goal. The students do the research, analyzing, writing, revising, mounting and
staging. They can even look for support from family members, friends, community and local leaders.

Creative Dramatics
 Dramatic plays
- People come together with a sole purpose of putting life to the material.
- The essence of coming together and believing that the material is worth staging is a form of a “play”.
- The “play” does not end with the production but it is shared to an audience and they too become part of the
“play”.
- The foundation of drama is dramatic play.

Constructivist theory is behind this learning approach. Using children’s knowledge and perception will help shape
their views of life. This will be achieved using dramatic play done through a process of experiential approach.
- The approach is exposing children to games and in these games is built on objectives that the teacher
would like to
achieve.
- The process is not threatening since the activity is only a game. Then drawing the learning experience from
the game and connecting it to real life situations makes learning grounded in reality.
- The children become critical and open to deepening their understanding of the world.

Creative Dramatics (or Creative Drama) was officially defined in 1978 by The American Association of Theatre for
Youth, as “an improvisational, non-exhibitional, process-centered form of drama in which participants are guided by
a leader to imagine, enact and reflect upon human experience” (Davis & Behm 10-11).
 Nellie McCaslin, in her book, Creative Drama in the Classroom and Beyond, acknowledges that the
activities involved in Creative Drama are always improvised, that the players create their dialogue, and that what is
created is not intended for an audience. The players/children in creative dramatics create performance through
improvisations. Improvisational process does not need a script.

- Performance are done in a class with other members of the class watch. They give also comments and
suggestions based on their observation and the theme.
- Later this performances can be shown to other classes.
- The teacher (facilitator) gives exercises that will draw skills that will enable them to join in theater, develop
new understanding of themselves and the world, and be able to use their body and voice to communicate.
The theater exercises are actually games designed to build theater skills.

When children are aware of the theater concepts this becomes part of their vocabulary in any theater
creative process. The children are more empowered because of the knowledge they have gained through the
process. All these theater skills are acquired through experiential learning. The challenge in employing creative
dramatics in the classroom activities lies on the hand of the teacher. The teacher should be exposed to the
experiential approach as a teaching strategy.
Essential to creative dramatics are the communication skills, listening, understanding and even
compromising. “Putting aside personal control and authority for the group successful completion of a task, synergy is
built within the group, empowering the members to achieve something the individually they could not do” In
creative dramatics the teacher becomes the facilitator and the students are the ones that take shape of their
learning.

Philosophical and Educational Foundation of Creative Dramatics

Drama
Elements:
-Characters
-Setting
-Plot
-Theme
-Conflict
-Dialogue/language
Theater Elements
-Acting
-Sets/construction -Directing
-Properties -Theater Architecture
-Make-up -Dramaturgy/Criticism
-Costume
-Lights
-Sounds
-Music