LOADING...

Costume pieces and recorded music.

Paper and pencils

Desks and tables cleared so that there is space to create.

I CAN improvise onstage, using my own words to communicate what is needed in a scene.

I CAN participate in an original show and apply the theatre terms I have learned to what I am doing onstage.

I CAN identify the ways in which I can make a difference in caring for the earth.

I CAN compare lifestyles 100 years ago in Connecticut and the ways that people live today. eg. plastic water bottles.

DAY ONE: Teaching artist will involve students in a discussion about their experiences being a part of all the changes they have gone through beginning in March of 2020. Students will be introduced to the art of improvisation for the stage and to the elements of character, plot, setting, and dramatic conflict onstage. The class will then break up into small groups and will choose one moment from the Covid-19 experience from the many moments discussed. Together each group will create an improvisation. Teacher and teaching artist will help smaller groups as they create and practice the dramatizations. Teaching artist will introduce theatre terminology to class such as staying in character, blocking, cheating out, as well as listening and responding to fellow characters onstage. Students will share their improvisations with the class. Prior to this residency, the class will explore the lives of people who lived in Connecticut 100 years ago and be ready to share it on Day Two of this program. They may choose to learn about what children did for fun, what a school day was like, and how they got the food that they ate. How was life different for children in the city of Hartford verses for those who lived on farms?

DAY TWO: Students will be involved in a discussion about the lives of people living in Connecticut 100 years ago. What problems have arisen since then with regards to the increased population, the warming of the planet, and the way an increased population is using water, plastic, and electricity? Students will share their ideas regarding the ways in which they want to move forward in regards to taking care of ourselves and of the Earth. The teaching artist will review the elements of character, setting, plot, and conflict found in improvisation. Students will move into smaller groups and will choose to create one improvisation that reflects one or more of the ways in which they would like to move forward in how we take care of ourselves and of our planet. Teacher and teaching artist will assist the groups in coming up with ideas for improvisations. Students will share their improvisations.


DAY THREE: Students will review what has taken place prior to Day Three. Teaching artist will lead students in a poetry exercise that will express what individual students love about the Earth. Students will then meet with their smaller groups and will select two poems to dramatize and will apply the theatre exercise they just learned in dramatizing the poems. Groups will share their dramatized poems with the class. The poems selected will serve as the opening and the closing of the original show. The teaching artist will review theatre terminology such as staying in character, listening to each other onstage, and blocking, as well as terms such as projection, cheating out, upstaging another character, stage right, left, center and upstage/downstage. Actors will rehearse the scenes they created on Day Two; scenes about the ways in which they want to move forward in taking care of each other and of the Earth. These scenes will be verbal or non- verbal. Recorded music will be added for the poetry at beginning and end of original theatre production.


DAY FOUR: Students will then be guided through the show from the beginning to the end and will be led in a formal rehearsal process in which the terminology of theatre will be used and what has been learned about theatre will be applied by the student actors in the work that is being dramatized.


DAY FIVE: Students will perform TAKING CARE OF THE EARTH AND OURSELVES IN A CHANGING WORLD for classes that have been invited to the presentation. At the end of the performance, actors will reinforce the ways we can all participate in moving forward in this way. Students will engage audience members by asking them to share any more ideas about how we can help.