New upgrades for our MS Drama classes!

    I am thrilled to report that there are some new and exciting changes to our 7/8th grade Drama program this year! Our 7/8th grade students will be choosing Fine Arts' electives! Each trimester, students can choose to take Drama, Art, or Dance. This will give students a chance to explore a variety of Arts' offerings or go more in depth with one particular interest.
    In Drama, this will give us an opportunity to explore specific themes and dramatic styles as a group all keenly interested in Dramatic Art. Our shared interests will help support, encourage, and shape our learning as we explore a variety of theatrical genre from around the world and history. In trimester 1, our 7th grade Drama students can take Shadow Puppetry, where we'll design, create, write, and perform our own Shadow Puppet plays based on folktales from Asia (where Shadow Puppetry was developed into a high-art form). For 8th grade Drama students, they can take Commedia dell'Arte, where we'll explore this comedic style from the Italian Renaissance and then design Commedia masks and write and perform our own modern Commedia plays! It should be a great start to our first-ever Drama electives at APR!
    And not to be outdone, our 5th grade students will begin their introduction to Drama with their exploratory course. We'll spend the year discovering different styles of storytelling: from performing multicultural folktales in tableaux style in Trimester 1 to an exploration of family stories and improvising American stories and creating our own fairytales at the end of the year. It will be an exciting year of discovering acting, playwriting, design, and performance for our youngest APR students!
    And for any students for whom being in a Drama class just isn't enough time on stage? They can check out our productions! Aladdin, Jr. this fall and then our winter one-acts and spring ZIPS!
It's going to be a fun and busy year for Drama at APR!

5th grade storytellers

   Our 5th grade Drama course focuses on the theme of Dramatic Storytelling. Whether it's telling stories in a frozen Tableaux or using our voices to convey different characters or interpreting family folktales in a dramatic format or creating our own unique fairytales to perform, this first year course introduces students to the performing arts where all students can easily access the curriculum and art form.
   This winter, students are taking family stories and dramatically performing them in small groups. They are researching from their families, uncovering stories from when their elders first started school, and then they are script-writing, creating characters, and rehearsing these stories for a dramatic performance. Storytelling as an art form has been around for thousands of years as a way to pass on family legacies and as a way of teaching future generations. You can check out lots of family folklore storytellers on YouTube, as well as a sample of Native American storytelling on this link: Native American storytelling conference: Smithsonian Museum

7th graders as Shadow Puppeteers

    In the busy and creative 7th grade Drama classes this winter, students are becoming shadow puppeteers! Using Chinese myths from their Mandarin course and building upon their Visual Art skills, they are scriptwriting their own shadow puppet plays, designing the puppets and scene designs, and preparing to perform their own creative plays in class this winter. This tricky performance art method has been around for centuries, beginning in Indonesia and catching on throughout the world over the years.
     Our 3rd floor cafeteria has been transformed into a shadow puppet theatre, but if you want to check out professional samples as well, head to YouTube and search for "Shadow Puppets". There are some links on this post that you can view as well.Shadow Puppet play from Puerto Rico