Reasons for choosing theatrical language.

The value of a theatrical experience in school is a fact by now recognised by pedagogists, teachers and parents. In nowadays school this activity has a major value because it lets teachers to make an interdisciplinary route, in which may be involved the different parts of Knowledge.

Then in a theatrical route the child makes better his own way of being with friends, he knows better himself and his possibilities, he becomes aware that there are many ways to communicate. All this takes place in an educational community where knowledge is not ready, but it has to be required together.

Route of work carried out in the theatrical laboratory 

Theatre characterizes itself for the very particular relation between actors and audience. In fact there isn’t any theatre without these two necessary conditions.

But before coming to the communication with the audience, it is necessary  that the child has gone over other phases of theatrical work. It starts with play-drama activities which are not aimed to the realization of a performance, but to the expressive maturity of children.
These activities take place inside the group with a good amount of improvisation, under the guide of an animator. By the games of dramatization children will find some difficulties in using their body and then they will understand the utility of educating it by a work of theatrical laboratory.  

These are, in summary, the phases of work carried out in the laboratory:

  1. Forming of the group

  • Activity of sintony of group

  • Activity of concentration

  • Activity of developing the creativity.

The aims of these activities are to free yourself from inhibitions and reserves, to control more your own body, to help the most shy to express themselves and the most lively to collaborate and to control themselves.

  1. The expression

  • Improvisation with the body

  • Improvisation with the voice

By ‘living’ and not ‘telling’ the situations, the child will be able to pass on them in a spontaneous and warm way.

  1. Becoming aware

  • Self-observation

  • Reflection on the made work.

Before the child ‘lives’ an experience, then he is led to reflect on the made work, to the awareness of what he did.

  1. Communication

  • Construction of the character

  • Dramatization

  • Performance

This last phase completes the route, putting in conditions to communicate to others the richness of what everyone experimented inside the theatrical laboratory

Which was the role of teachers in this laboratorial route?

The teacher has the purpose of driving the group with awareness, giving the right stimulus at the right time, alternating and grading the exercises, calibrating the moments of plays and those ones of reflection. You have to look through what is happening, to be ready to accept what children propose as  new, but you have to warrant the rules that the group decided to give itself  for working better. The most insecure children have to be spurred and encouraged but the most lively have to be controlled so that they don’t prevail on others.

Finally all the work was completed with the awareness that, when you make  a theatrical activity at school, the aim is to promote the growth of people whom you work with.

The route is more important than the result.

The work must find its meaning in the development of new capacities in the child, in the enjoyment of seeking, in the experimentation of a doing and of a communicating which are different from the usual ones.

The final performance, turned to the audience, can give children a bigger satisfaction and can become a test of what they learned, but the teacher has not to neglect the value of the single experience with the advantage of the final result.