Drama as a Teaching Tool: Freeze-Frame Tableaux

Art lasts longer than anything else about a culture. We have the music in our heads long after we’ve forgotten whatever we knew about the composer or his century. Given enough time, cultural memory doesn’t preserve athletic games specific to that culture. (I may be wrong, but I’m guessing the number of people who participate in caber-tossing or Roman gladiatorial combat  is rapidly decreasing.) Even inventions and political systems, which may still have some lingering effect on our lives, survive as stories rather than realities. We don’t know what invention enabled the Egyptians to move huge stones into pyramid formation, but the architecture moves us, and moves us to invention of things as delightfully bizarre as The Mummy. 

But arts take longer to fade: stories, song, studio arts, architecture, and theater, the unification of all the other arts. Though we remember less and less about their creators, we can easily recognize the David and the Mona Lisa and the Pyramids of Giza. Authors and their history slip easily into the obsolete, but we still make movies, poems and imaginative retellings of the Odyssey. The stories, where all human culture began, stick around, and the more actively they are told, the more they endure in personal and cultural memory. Why do stories last the longest? Because they are personal. Why are students often at first reluctant to participate in performative storytelling? Because it is personal. For educators, educating persons is a sine qua non. Otherwise, we’re just trying to download data into alarmingly inert vegetable matter.

All of which is a sneaky way of getting to the claim that all students will learn more, remember more, and be better educated if they participate in story performance. In the classroom, I can identify three reasons why this doesn’t happen.

Performance Anxieties

First, many or most students rebel against performing. Second, teachers are uncertain about how to conduct performance in their classes, or do not want to oust other teaching strategies or assignments to give time to performance. Third, performance and the arts in general are widely seen as extracurriculars or electives—either way, lowest on the totem pole. (Funny thing about totem poles: whatever is lowest is holding up everything else.)

In answer to the third, see the beginning of this article. For the first and second, see the rest of this article.

Many or most students do not want to perform. Standing up in front of classmates entails vulnerability. Body language reveals the soul, and there is nothing to hide behind when you are on stage: no lectern, no abstraction, no paper and notes to refer to. We feel ourselves exposed to the judgment of others, and that’s a risky proposition. But since we want our students to be courageous, as well as to recognize themselves and others as essentially body and soul, it is worth putting them in a scenario where success doesn’t have to solely rely on them, with rubrics that everyone is required to observe, as with any other type of assignment.

Many or most teachers do not at first want to practice performative storytelling in the classroom. In these classes, even when the text is a play, there can be an inclination to focus on reading, writing, and test-taking, because we are most comfortable with what is conventional. But we’re called to grow, too, and growth doesn’t happen without changing some status quo. I recently watched one of our eighth grade core classes perform scenes from Julius Caesar as the culmination of studying the play. They were doing an amazing job, experienced or not, and having a blast. They won’t forget it any time soon, and they’ll connect to a great work of art more easily in the future. The other more legitimate reason teachers avoid performative storytelling is that we just don’t know how to do it. So let’s get to some practicals. 

Though a case can be made for classroom performance no matter the subject, I’ll restrict myself for now to the humanities, because they most obviously and directly represent people, whether in human actions, thoughts, or imaginations. How do we conduct a performative assignment that brings these people to life?

Making Performance Possible

One way to do this is by human freeze-frames. Here is the gameplan:

1. Set the stage. Tell them how this is going to work, that it is graded, and that their classmates are going to give an open forum assessment of each group. In addition to your own assessment, peer observation augments the motivation toward excellence. 
2. Divide the class into small groups. Four works best, in my experience, but it’s got to be more than two. This group, on their own initiative and without telling the rest of the class, identifies a moment connected to the story. It’s more fun if you pick something that doesn’t happen on the page but is referred to or must have happened for the story to work. It encourages and frees the imaginative faculty, gives an increased sense of ownership to the group, and is more entertaining to the audience, who always want revelation rather than repetition. For example, we hear that Prospero met Caliban, but this does not happen as part of the play, only as an angry description based on recent bias, so an invention of the backstory is intriguing to the inventor and the viewer. 
3. Similarly, when choosing characters, it is often more interesting to play bystander characters never named in the story, like an innkeeper, a servant, or a fan in the crowd. You can make character suggestions to get their imaginations flowing, but let them make the final pick. They’re more likely to do well if they own it. The main requirement here is that each character be clear (we can tell who they are) and distinct (each one is obviously different from all the others, most importantly in expressions of personality).
4. Have them rehearse. Usually ten minutes of rehearsal will suffice for a decent performance, and you can always do a “rough draft” performance to maximize classroom time. They pick a series of “freeze-frames” that form a kind of stop-motion or flipbook effect in which a sequence of static images becomes a fluid story. The advantage of freeze-frames is that they don’t have to maintain a continuous character in movement, and they don’t have to talk. It feels easier to the actor but still looks cool to the audience. Again, make suggestions about different possible stances for each character, but make clear that the students have the final say. I’ve found five to seven frames is a good range. They’ll probably ask if they can use hand props or furniture; the answer is no. This is only about body language and facial expression. Mime holding something if you need to, and don’t have any character mime sitting down. (It never looks like you’re sitting down.)
5. Have them perform. Tell everyone, especially the audience members, that this doesn’t work unless everyone commits to their role. For the audience, this means following your directions for observation and maintaining courtesy, especially during the first draft. Say outright that, of course, there will be an instinct to laugh, because we will see each other act as people that we aren’t and behave in ways that aren’t our own normal behavior. Point out that containing oneself as much as possible is necessary for best results. They’ll respond well to this. 
6.  For the performance, you give the following directions. “Lights out” means the audience closes their eyes. “Take position x” means the actors move to their next frame. “Lights up” means the audience opens their eyes and observes the new frame. Their goal is to see whether all the characters are clear and distinct, and whether the story is clear. 
7. Give a round of applause and feedback. Audience members should be as specific as possible in their feedback, giving both a compliment and a criticism. This challenges the viewer and not just the actor. The assignment is for everyone present, not just the performers. 

This works most obviously with literature, but also with history, and perhaps less obviously with philosophy and theology. I have instruction manuals for those, too, but perhaps that’s another article. Conducting performative storytelling may require stepping out of the comfort zone for both students and teachers, but only at first, and the payoff is tremendous in the short and the long term. 

To perform, in the root meaning, means to bring something to fullness, to shape completely. What is shaped? The person. Without performance, the person is incomplete.