Drama Arts Bridge Scholar: Day 4: Face and Body in Drama

In connection with your voice and gestures, we each have our facial expression and our entire bodies to help us convey meaning to an audience. One great way to give students a small brain break is to participate in the "brain dance". This helps students connect their mind and body and allows them to focus and feel energized. I didn't use that in this lesson, but I wanted to mention it here because it is another small example about how movement can really encourage greater concentration and focus in students.

In this lesson my objective was that "Students will be able to express emotion using their faces and their bodies".

Materials: Instrumental music

Warm-Up: Three Theater Games

1. Explore Emotions on the Face: Students will start by stretching their face muscles by doing two faces lion face (like a lion is about to eat something) and lemon face (puckering).

- Then divide the class in half and I will call out various emotions, one at a time. I want them to show me what that would look like to them on their faces and whole bodies. Those include emotions like:

Happy
Sad
Mad
Annoyed
Calm
Excited
Confused
Surprised
Scared
Etc.

2. Mirror Mirror - In this warm-up, students will be in partnerships. Their goal is for whoever to be watching not know who is leading the action. Without words students will do random movements with their bodies and the partner must copy them as if they were their mirror. During the game we will switch who leads and try to be the most accurate as possible in copying their partner.

3. Bippety Bippety Bop - In this game, one person is in the spinning with their eyes closed. Once they stop and point to someone, simultaneously the middle person will try to say “Bippety Bippety Bop” before the person and the people at their sides make the elephant formation (a trunk and two ears)
Variation includes washing machine (builds box around middle person and middle person moves arms all around) and car (windshield wipers and two tires).

The students loved these warm-up games which really helped them work with each other, focus on different people and explore what emotions could be shown through whole body expression.

Activity: Each student gets a character notecard and has it taped to their forehead. (It is easier if you have the tape ready or use another way for the students to wear a notecard without them seeing it.) We then do “Party Quirks” where 4 students at a time walk into a party and have to guess who these people are. Students must ask "Yes/No" questions to figure out which character they are.

Once everyone knows who they are, you must find your partner - there are pairs of people