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Drama: Secondary| Key resources 1 - A social theory of language to underpin drama
Dramatic deconstructions of text and context
Pupils can use the conventions of drama as a means of exploring and discovering what lies beneath the surface of the texts they engage with in the English classroom.
They can:
- explore the issues within the story before meeting the text
- enact scenes in the original text
- take the roles of characters or ‘voices’ from the text and be questioned about motives and intentions
- use space and objects (including costume) in a variety of realist and symbolist ways to represent meanings in the text; to physically represent the psychic or cultural distance between characters, for instance
- create ‘missing’ scenes or moments that are suggested but not fleshed out in the original text
- explore how to use gesture to convey ‘sub-text’; how inner speech can be visibly played for instance
- script, or improvise, alternative scenes or endings
- extend the story back in time or forward into an imagined future
- add or expand minor characters and their lives and involvement
- demonstrate to each other that there can be a variety of ‘possibles’ when it comes to the interpretation and representation of meanings (different groups will respond to the same task in different ways).
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Drama provides students with an immediate and physical means of getting to grips with texts and textual representation. Most of what our students know of the world, they know through representations of it. Drama provides students with a way of reconstructing the experience that is represented. This process causes students to become more conscious of ‘voice’ - the ideological interests within the text.
In a very concrete and physical way students can, through their drama-making, ask questions about:
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Who is telling the story? (voice: dominant/marginalised; gender, culture etc.)
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For whom?
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What form does the story take?
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What is emphasised/ made invisible?
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How else could the story be told? (from other perspectives)
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What is the real story being told? (what are we being persuaded to think/feel)
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Trainees could analyse how these ideas have been used in the work on Louis Sachar’s Holes which is included in the drama workshop materials at: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/keystage3/respub/en_dramaobjs
 
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