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THE SUBJECT

Drama and Theatre - Why does it matter?

You walk into your classroom. It's been a tough weekend, you bring your classroom alive, challenging, inspiring, enabling students to step out of their comfort zone but in a safe space, you discuss politics, challenges, obstacles, you also teach laughter, clowning, the ability to become someone else. For those moments that child is in your class you enable them to speak up, you enable them to understand that their voice matters and you equip them with skills that even if they don’t go into the industry will enable them to be an empathetic person that can see outside themselves and reflect on who they are and the world around them. In fact your space may well be the only place they feel heard.

Your classroom may be a black box, a temporary classroom, the school hall that everyone walks through whatever space it is, you need to remember as Peter Brook said an empty space is all you need, it is the interaction between player and viewer that matters whether that is teacher, peer, parents or friends where the truth can be explored, where all whether it be performer or audience can escape.

Yes there are all the practitioners and skills you will teach but the fundamental aspects of this are body language and vocality as it is this that underpins every single character that will be portrayed but also helps a young person understand how important body language and vocality are in every single interaction in life, even with silence we can speak loudly with how we hold that silence, what’s the positioning, level and gesture.

The non-verbal communication you teach, the ability to read body language to understand their own body language. To understand their tone of voice, use of language and the way the intonation can change the intention of the words.

Drama and Theatre is powerful it is the only space where truth can change an audience perspective on how they actually live their lives, because even as an audience member you are in a safe space to be able to watch and analyse and evaluate your own place in the world, drama and theatre can make you question and reflect on your own choices and actions.

Let’s flip it, if Drama and Theatre wasn’t powerful why would plays, musicals, theatre be cancelled in certain countries, why would certain themes etc be banned. It is the only space where there is truly freedom of speech, where you can challenge the hierarchy and be safe in doing so, but it is changing. Schools across the world are not allowed to do certain plays, not allowed to study certain musicals, and have had to pull their school shows because local governments have got involved.

Even in the UK the subject is dwindling, disappearing in so many schools we know the graphics are clear to see, the data easy to analyse. Drama is being squeezed out and budgets are being blamed, but we must understand that by losing Drama we are losing the next generation of speakers, storytellers and creators and that creation brings an awful lot of money into our country and does so much for oracy and crucially creating a well rounded human being who is an asset to society.

We must continue to teach our young people the power that they have, the voice they have and if it’s too scary they can create a piece of theatre where they deliver what they truly want to say through the character they have created. Drama and Theatre is therapeutic and can help so many.

I maintain that if all governments were led by creative beings and cabinets were created with creative beings the world would be a much happier and kinder place, because what we teach in drama and theatre is not just fundamental to the creative industries it is fundamental to social harmony within society, we teach what it is to be human.