Dress up Day!

                               

Children love dressing up! It is just a universal truth. It transports them to a whole new fantastical world where imagination is the only limit. They can explore who they are, who they want to be and experiment with different characters. It is quite amazing to witness. The most timid of children can transform into a mighty ruler commanding respect when donning a cape and a crown, or the most serious child can become a frivolous fairy tale character or goofy court jester if they put on the right hat, or wings or shoes.

 

I think it is also about how tangible the character becomes. A prop or costume allows you to really become that character, live inside their skin as it were. 

Many of our activities are based on mime and using your imagination, pretending you are wearing a heavy coat or tool-belt or flowing skirt. But when they dress up, they can see and feel what it's like to be that character.

Frankly, I have a confession to make – we are amongst friends, right? I love the feeling of dressing up silly for a Fancy Dress party or Halloween. And secretly, I think all adults do. It adds a swagger to our step or invokes talking in an (often quite bad) accent. Even impersonating the character we have dressed as, swinging our pearls or looping our thumbs around our cowboy belt buckle. 

We are allowed for a short while to just be kids again.

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At Helen O’Grady Drama Academy we have a dress up activity for every lesson of Term 1, the students absolutely love it! They receive a list of what they need to dress up as each week and have to come up with their own costumes and or props – and the catch is, they are not allowed to go out and buy the costume, they have to use what they have at home... some even make their own costumes!

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This is a great creative exercise and helps to build the anticipation for their next lesson as they get a bit of a clue what the dress up activity will be about, but they don’t know exactly what they will be doing.

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This is also a great way to prepare the students for our year end productions which includes full costume. Now let’s be honest, as much as a costume can be the ultimate way to get into character, in more ways than one, a costume can also sometimes be a challenge. Most of the time children wear super comfy clothes to their drama class, something they can easily move around in. Whereas costumes can be stiff, or baggy or distracting. By doing the dress up days, children learn to be and stay in character even when they are not wearing their normal drama clothes and allowing the costume and props the enhance their character and not hinder them.

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Dressing up is also just a great way to entertain children and keep them busy for hours. Not a bad idea when we all need to come up with ways to entertain our children at home for the next few weeks!

Written by Charlotte Tervit - Vice-Principal, Helen O'Grady Drama Academy Pretoria

Let My People Go!

Helen O'Grady Pretoria and Midrand recently hosted a Cultural performance by an American performing group Evelyn Graves Drama Productions from Philadelphia, USA. Our students and parents were invited to join us for this wonderful opportunity to witness an American performance and interact with the performers after the show. Some of our own Helen O’ Grady students also took to the stage with a few fun Theatre Games to get the audience warmed up and ready for the main attraction.

Evelyn Graves Drama Productions was established in the 1970’s by Evelyn Graves and has been performing ever since. They performed two of their signature plays: “Behold the Man,” a production written by Evelyn Graves that dramatizes the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as well as  "Let My People Go," a historical dramatic musical presentation dedicated to Black History in commemoration of how God sent Moses to deliver his people, the Israelites, from under the bondage of Pharaoh through song and dance. It depicts the bondage of the Black man and his escape to freedom focusing on Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Park, and other great leaders of the African American rich heritage.

The morning was a huge success ending in a standing ovation for “Let My People Go”. The students and parents loved the whole experience and were moved and entertained, feeling the energy and excitement of a powerful live theatre performance.  

In a previous interview Cassandra Graves, who now heads the production company created by her mother, said “Our motto is ‘the healing arts.’ It heals you when you see a play like this, it grabs you to the very core. The healing arts are so powerful that it heals the performer, and it heals the audience as well. When you see a live performance on stage, and it’s done well, it just touches you and that’s a part of our mission.”

While some productions utilise only the spoken word, Graves described Evelyn Graves Productions as multi-faceted ones, which incorporates music, dance and drama. This, she said, has appealed to its audiences throughout the years.

Dr Cassandra Graves

We also had the privilege of seeing members if the principle cast that’s been part of Evelyn Graves Productions for 10, 20, or 30 years, such as Vance Evans who played the role of Jesus in the production for some 30 years.

“It’s been a blessing ever since, I never thought I’d be playing ‘the man’,” Evans said.

It was such a wonderful learning opportunity for our students to see how to produce a powerful, engaging and entertaining performance with a bare stage, a few costumes and props and the most basic of sound systems (which was in fact a small portable speaker and the piano played on a smart phone). An excellent example of how to create multiple characters per cast member, use music in a performance, powerful and effective voice projection, and the use of a performance space. 

And finally, to top it all, the chance to have conversations with the likes of Vance Evans and the wonderful Cassandra Graves herself added the final hurrah to an unforgettable morning for all, the audience and cast alike. What a wonderful experience to have people from opposite ends of the globe come together and find a common understanding and passion through the performing arts, transcending age, culture and history! #Dramarocks

Life is a rollercoaster - of emotions!

We all feel a little sad 😞, angry 😡, frustrated 😖or overwhelmed sometimes. Some of us are better than others at managing our emotions and not letting it come with us into the classroom or even influence our working or personal relationships, but as adults we have at least a semblance of EQ to keep ourselves in check.

The same cannot always be said for the children we work with on a daily basis. 3 year olds’ tantrums, clinginess or attention seeking, all the way to petulant, aloof or insecure teenagers are just par for the course for most teachers, but let’s be honest, it can become fairly challenging with a room full of, shall we say more flamboyant personalities who are usually attracted to drama lessons.

It can truly be a test of your EQ and patience to manage such emotions or outbursts in class. This past week we had a  discussion about emotions with our Kindy kids as part of their All About Me theme, and that got me thinking about how we can manage the emotions of children who attend our classes so that everyone in class can still have a productive day, but at the same time we must still validate the feelings of, and show empathy to the children who are having a bad day.

Now I’m sure any teacher out there will agree that that is a pretty tall order and I promise you there is no way I’m pretending that I have it down to a T!

 So, I did a bit or research and I’m happy to report that there is a plethora of information, articles and tips out there to help manage emotions in the classroom, like:

 How To Handle Temper Tantrums, Emotional Outbursts, And Other Outrageously Immature Behavior on www.smartclassroommanagement.com

How to Deal with Challenging Behaviour in the Classroom on www.highspeedtraining.co.uk

And of course let’s remember our favourite quote by Ashleigh Warner:-

“Beneath every behaviour there is a feeling. And beneath each feeling there is a need. And when we meet that need rather than focus on the behaviour, we begin to deal with the cause and not the symptom”

Sometimes you can also turn the emotional situation into a teaching opportunity by having a discussion about the particular emotion in question, or emotions in general, and how understanding our emotions can help us when we do character work. Then act out various emotions walking around, making sounds or sentences to express that emotion. You can even let them choose characters who are experiencing different emotions. Sometimes the group can even come up with some solutions of how they can manage their own emotions.

Sadly, we live in a world where many kids face a multitude of challenges in their lives like bullying (physical, verbal and online) as well as enormous stresses and pressure academically, socially, at home, and even from the media, depending on their age. We need to be prepared and have a strategy to deal with unpredictable behaviour or risk losing valuable teaching time or even control of the classroom altogether.  Once again, as I have said so often before, I believe that we are in a very privileged position to give the children a safe place to express their feelings.

Finally, I often think, as I’m sure you will agree, a hug and validation go a long way and is sometimes just what a child needs to make them feel ok again!

- Charlotte Tervit (Vice-Principal)