DRAMA

Introduction

Drama expresses human experience through a focus on role, action, and tension, played out in time and space. In drama education, students learn to structure these elements and to use dramatic conventions, techniques, and technologies to create imagined worlds. Through purposeful play, both individual and collaborative, they discover how to link imagination, thoughts, and feelings.

Learning in, through, and about Drama stimulates creative action and response by engaging and connecting thinking, imagination, senses, and feelings. By participating in Drama, students' personal well-being is enhanced. As students express and interpret ideas within creative, aesthetic, and technological frameworks, their confidence to take risks is increased.

In Drama, students learn to work both independently and collaboratively to construct meanings, produce works, and respond to and value others' contributions. They learn to use imagination to engage with unexpected outcomes and to explore multiple solutions.

As students work with drama techniques, they learn to use spoken and written language with increasing control and confidence and to communicate effectively using body language, movement, and space. As they perform, analyse, and respond to different forms of drama and theatre, they gain a deeper appreciation of their rich cultural heritage and language and new power to examine attitudes, behaviours, and values.

By means of the drama that they create and perform, students reflect and enrich the cultural life of their schools, whānau, and communities.

Why choose Drama?

• Drama supports imaginativeness, exuberance, and having fun.
• When people play roles consciously, they begin to sharpen their skills of noticing and managing their own thoughts.
• Improvising opens the mind to the continuing flow of imagery and inspirations from the creative subconscious.
• In today's world, creativity is needed as never before. Drama-especially improvisational types of drama-develop the skills needed for creative thinking.
• Techniques and concepts derived from drama are now being applied in business, education, community-building, personal development, therapy, professional skills training and so forth.
• Empathy can be developed through imagining what it's like to be in another person's role, and so this process can be used to foster greater understanding and interpersonal skills.
• Dramatic activities also promote the process of self-expression, responding to the need to be seen and heard. The process also offers a way for people to take the audience role, learning to appreciate and recognize others as they perform
• One of the most important benefits of weaving principles and techniques of drama into everyday life is that it enriches the experience of living, makes it more meaningful, vivid, and fun.