Effective Practices: Conscious Theater Productions
Gleaning from our experience working with small schools and organizations for nearly five years as a group and decades as individuals, we have created a series of documents on Effective Practices that we are excited to offer to our clients.
Each document is focused on a key theme or area that clients often have questions about or need support to improve. Our intention with the Effective Practice documents is to offer maps for our clients and share resources that can serve a wide range of small schools and types of organizations. We intend for these resources to support unique inquiries and journeys while addressing common themes, as communities widen to become more inclusive, equitable, diverse, and just.
Today, we warmly share the next in our Effective Practices series, Conscious Theater Productions. This document focuses on strategies, resources, and important aspects to consider when casting, adapting, and directing plays in your school community.
Document preview:
Theater productions are incredible opportunities to introduce students to the beautiful and complex nature of our world. Theater is a portal to other times, places, and cultures. Because theater is so vivid and emotional, there are also many places within it where our own biases can lurk. This document offers ideas for, and examples of, a show brought to the stage with context and consciousness. May all your productions open your students’ eyes and swing open doors of wonder and empathy.
Effective practices to consider:
1. Prepare with the text and your colleagues
Review the text line-by-line
Do a close reading, or a DIA protocol on the text
Gather the perspectives of other colleagues, including BIPOC educators
2. Learn about and dive into the context
While most schools do not have a budget for a dramaturg (a literary adviser or editor who researches, selects, adapts, edits, and/or interprets texts), everyone has the ability to do dramaturgical research, or deep research on the context of a production. Consider using the action research model as a way of working together. Teachers can work as cohorts to plan a production together. (See the Resources section at the end of this document for two articles on action research as a methodology.)
3. Bring the play and its context to your students
Offer historical and cultural context to the play before reading it.
Offer poetry and other artistic or cultural forms of expression that existed beside it (consider sculpture, fabric arts, painting, etc).
Offer rereadings, retellings, or reworkings of the play or plays from the same playwright in/from modern times.
More ideas in the full document.
4. Consider representation and casting questions
Be conscious about the impact of casting White students in roles originally reserved for people of color, or roles depicting people of color. When possible, avoid it.
Similarly, be conscious of identity when casting roles, in general. Make sure that if you are casting someone into a role outside of their racial or ethnic group, for example, that it is done respectfully, and possibly with script modifications to accommodate the change.
Do not use Blackface, or any of its equivalents.
More ideas in the full document on casting BIPOC roles and using vernacular.
5. Bring a cultural appreciation lens
Theater productions often include explicit and implicit cultural elements from non-dominant cultures. It’s important, when engaging these cultural elements, to do so from a place of intention. Below are some guiding questions and lenses to avoid cultural appropriation and emphasize appreciation.
The full document (available only to current clients) includes more effective practices and a list of accompanying resources. If you’re a current client and don’t have access to this document, please write to us at connect@almapartners.net for a copy. We also offer 1-hour consulting sessions to go deeper on the content of this document. If you’re not a client yet, book an introductory call with us to learn more!