Lower School Performing Arts

In the Middle School, theater Arts instruction continues in a required nine-week unit for fifth graders that meets twice a week and a semester unit for sixth graders that meets twice a week.

theater Arts is offered as an elective year-long course in collaboration with the Visual Arts department for seventh and eighth graders. All Middle School theater Arts students participate in skill-building activities at an intermediate level. These activities are designed to increase kinetic awareness, refine vocal techniques, and enhance imagination, analytical thinking, and improvisational skills. Performance opportunities include participation in the combined Upper and Middle School musical, other small scale class scenes and/or one-act plays, and a spring Middle School play. Grade level instruction is constructed as follows:

Fifth grade students are introduced to basic actor tools—voice, emotion, gesture, facial expression, imagination, and body—over the course of a required one-quarter term. Students learn to apply these tools to their work in class through exploration and scene presentation of short American folktales. Students also become acquainted with the art of storytelling as a form of dramatic arts.

Sixth grade students continue to build their awareness of basic actor tools in their required semester-long theater Arts class. Additionally, they examine a selected Shakespearean play at an in-depth level, and later, in the spring, they travel to nearby Staunton, Virginia to see this play performed professionally at the Blackfriars Playhouse by the American Shakespeare Center actors.

Seventh and eighth grade students may choose to enroll in a year-long Stop-Action Animation course, taught collaboratively between the Visual and theater Arts departments. The theater Arts component introduces playwriting, set/scene composition, and character development. Students apply these skills to several Stop-Action Animation projects, having sculpted clay characters and designed and built small, box sets in the Visual Art component of the class. Students then film their work, edit it, and present it to a variety of audiences.

Upper School students may enroll in theater Arts classes for up to five semesters in four years.

theater Arts I, offered during the first semester of each school year, is designed for students with any range of theater arts background and does not require previous stage experience. In this course, students become familiar with the elements of action as outlined in A Practical Handbook for the Actor (Bruider, Cohn, Olnek, Pollack, Previto, Zigler), and they explore the twelve guideposts of character development and acting as drawn from Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. Weekly acting projects allow students to apply each new guidepost they study. The course concludes with students presenting a memorized monologue and a expositional process paper for a select audience.

Students may enter the theater Arts II class mid-year without prior stage experience, however, completion of theater Arts I is strongly recommended for students entering the second semester theater Arts course. Second semester students examine a variety of theater components on a four-year rotation basis. These areas of study and practicum include playwriting, costume design and construction, set/scene design, and directing and production. The second semester theater Arts class culminates with student presentations in which students will, for example, write a one-act play or extended monologue; choose a published period play from which they will select one character for whom they will design a costume plot and construct at least one costume from their own designs; select a published play and design a set and/or backdrop scene that they will present in a three-dimensional model; or select a scene from a published play to which they apply specific directing techniques and then present their work using fellow classmates and/or outside actors. Additionally, students of the directing and production class will learn to execute various tasks of theater production such as box office procedures, advertising, stage management, and properties management. Students will present their work during the final week of the semester for their classmates and/or a select audience.

Upper School students may audition for extracurricular productions, including a fall Upper School play, a winter Middle and Upper School musical, and a spring student-directed play. Past productions include Fiddler on the Roof, Much Ado About Nothing, Cinderella, The Diviners, Oklahoma!, Twelfth Night, and The Servant of Two Masters.