1/2012

REFLECTIONS-CONCEPTS-CONTEXTS

Jaroslav Provazník: Does art belong to schools? And does drama education? - „It has been twenty years since drama entered Czech primary and secondary schools,“ introduces the author his article. „Although it has gradually ceased to be seen as an oddity, it still has to overcome barriers of stereotypes and prejudice.“ Only few schools have introduced drama as a subject - the most common form is drama as a method used in the teaching of other subjects. The author points out that the Czech primary school curriculum includes visual arts and music, whereas drama or dance are only optional subjects, which means schools can, but do not have to make them part of their curricula. Yet school education should provide a holistic picture of the field of arts. „Why is it important for all children to get in contact with drama, not only for those who do it as a leisure-time activity? Each of us is confronted with dramatic art or its various elements from childhood on, be it in film, television, video or computers. And yet children get minimum opportunities to find their way through this jungle of dramatic and stage features, to learn to perceive and understand it. One of the desired skills is the ability to identify bad taste and manipulation, which intentionally tries to blur the clear borderline between reality and fiction.“ The author concludes by proposing several issues to be discussed: He believes the time has come to include drama as a regular subject in the primary school curriculum. This would necessitate the founding of new specialised departments of drama at pedagogical faculties that would complement the two existing drama departments at the faculties of theatre in Prague and Brno, which have been successfully working for the past two decades. The last thing the author calls for is encouraging ministries to establish professional drama centers similar to those existing in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and other countries.

DRAMA-ART-THEATRE

Zuzana Jirsová: Insights 2011 (Nahlížení 2011) - A report on the 22nd workshop of youth theatre held in October 2011. The author appreciates that the dramaturgy of the festival included a rich programme that enabled the audience to get acquainted with the up-to-date forms of theatre played by youngsters. A special feature of the event is the fact that even unfinished performances can be presented there, which enables participants to discuss possible ways in which they could be developed and completed. Among the most inspiring the author mentions the Spiegel Cabaret by the group Divadlo Vydýcháno from the Basic School of Arts in Liberec, which was based on dada texts, or the performance The Angel Has not Come?! played by the Roztočená Vrtule group, which dealt with the subject of holocaust and was targeted mainly at teenagers. (The script is published in the text supplement of this issue of Tvořivá dramatika.)

DRAMA-EDUCATION-SCHOOL

Dominika Špalková: The Power in us…? A Look Back at Drama in Education 2011 - The subject of the world congress organised by AITA/IATA in the Austrian town of Retzhof in April 2011 was Power and Powerlessness. The author of the article who works at the DRAK puppet theatre in Hradec Králové, where she organises and leads workshops for classes of schoolchildren, gives an overview of this traditional European event. Each day, participants worked under the leadership of another lecturer. These included Judith Acroyd from the United Kingdom, György Vidovszky from Hungary, Alexander Fedorov from Russia and Brendon Burns from the United Kingdom. „Although the techniques presented at the workshops were not unknown in the context of Czech drama in education, the topic of the conference proved to be very meaningful. One of the things discussed at the conference was the fact that the worst situation is one in which one person or group abuse their power over another one to such an extent that people start taking it for normal and adjust to it. The article is followed by a description of the workshop led by György Vidovszky, which was inspired by Lars von Trier's film Dogville.
Marie Pavlovská-Lenka Remsová-Dušan Klapko: The First Steps to Research in Interactive Theatre with John Somers - John Somers, professor emeritus at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, playwright and founder of the Research in Drama Education journal, led a week-long workshop on interactive theatre at the Pedagogical faculty in Brno in 2008. This became an impulse for the teachers and students from the faculty to initiate a project of researching possibilities of interactive theatre as a method of dealing with negative social phenomena and developing personal and social competences of primary school pupils. The article describes the respective stages of the project, illustrating them by a script of an interactive theatre performance about a girl who gets into a critical situation and decides to solve it by suicide.
Markéta Popelová Nečasová: Drama Education as a Way to Children's Literacy – A description of a project in which the author explored ways of using drama methods in developing children's literacy. First she deals with elementary exercises, proceeding to structuring drama work, as this type of drama offers tools to examine the theme, problem situations, characters, time, environment and language in a literary text. Special attention is of course paid to theatrical work, especially one that has the nature of devising theatre, and poetry reading. „Certain works may be unaccessible for children as literary texts,“ concludes the author, „but if they can share the themes that a book raises in group work, examining them through action, they can get into its heart and understand it.“ At the end of her article the author presents two drama lessons based on literary texts: A Space Where Imagination Thrives (a lesson for 4th grade pupils based on Astrid Lindgren's book Ronia, the Robber's Daughter) and Language Tools (a lesson for 4th grade pupils based on Edward Lear's rhymes).
Klára Fidlerová: Poetry for Teenagers… Another sample lesson based on literary texts, this time aimed at teenagers. It was designed to take children under the surface of reflexive lyric poetry.

REFLECTIONS-REVIEWS-INFORMATION

The first block of this section, FIELD LITERATURE, brings a review by Eva Machková called The Story of Creative Drama in Kindergarten. She appreciates that the reviewed book Drama Education Methods in Kindergarten (Praha: Portál, 2011) written by Eva Svobodová and Hana Švejdová is well-researched and broadly conceived. Its authors „have dealt with all essential elements of drama for pre-schoolers, enriching it by their own experience. They have not only combined theory and practice, but found meaningful links between them. The style of the book is accessible and easy to understand both for experienced teachers and teacher trainees and as such is likely to awaken their interest.“
Eva Svobodová-Hana Švejdová: Terrorists in Kindergarten - A sample chapter from the book reviewed above.
The section ARTS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH contains the following materials:
Jaroslav Provazník: The Contemporary Poetry for Children - a New Golden Age? - This overview of Czech poetry for children written in the last decade, which the author sees as fruitful as far as poetry for children is concerned, consists of the following chapters: Continuity, force of habit and… vacuity (on authors building on the previous period, e.g. Josef Brukner, Věra Provazníková, Karel Šiktanc, etc.), The return of lyric poetry (especially in the work of Radek Malý), The tired and the revitalised nonsense poetry (Pavel Šrut, Jiří Žáček, Petr Nikl…), Ways to the roots of nonsense poetry and adventurous journeys behind its horizons (Ivan Wernisch and Daniela Fischerová) and The degenerated nonsense, where the author of the article deals with trashy forms of nonsense poetry.
Eva Machková: No Lies and Little Truth: Legends for Drama - The second part of a study on legends and the possibilities they offer to theatre and classroom drama.
Daniela von Vorst: KinderKinder. The 25th International Festival of Theatre and Music for Children in Hamburg - A report from the festival that annually provides children in Hamburg with the opportunity to see about sixty theatrical and music performances from all over the world. What makes the KinderKinder festival so attractive is its inspiring and colourful dramaturgy and high-quality performances. The author describes in more detail the Physical Music performance by the American group Lelavision, the Belgian performance Bramborry by the De Spiegel group, and especially the Jeg ved - hvor din hus den bor! (I Know Where your House Lives!) by the Danish group Åben Dans.
Luděk Korbel-Eva Davidová-Antonín Šimůnek-Lucie Kudělová-Andrea Pavlíčková: Reviews of new books - Reviews of new books for children that might inspire drama teachers and leaders of children’s theatre groups.

CHILDREN’S STAGE 37

The text supplement of Tvořivá dramatika (Creative Drama) brings the script to the performance which dealt with the subject of holocaust The Angel Has not Come? by Kateřina Oplatková Rezková she created together with her secondary-school theatre group Roztočená Vrtule from the town of Slaný. The performance was shown with great success at the National Festival of Young Theatre as well as the Insights workshop of youth theatre and drama in Bechyně in October 2011. The script is accompanied by detailed methodological commentary describing the genesis of the performance.