The Lines in the Classroom

Teaching Exercise:

Are you teaching a play with affective stage directions?

1. Pick some out to type up.

2. Print them out and then cut them up to separate each stage direction (or set of stage directions).

3. Next, fold them up and throw them in a hat.

4. Break your classroom up into small groups and let each group pick a stage direction out of the hat. They then have five minutes to enact the lines in whatever way they choose. They could draw them, perform a gif version, curate a short playlist of songs or sound effects, do an interpretive dance, or so on.

5. If you want to focus on the overall tone or mood of the play, then specify that the class should express their responses within the world of the play. If you want to show how much agency there is in the lines themselves, then encourage the class to separate the context from the play.

6. Then present the performances to the class and see if they can guess the stage directions.