When you perform a text, you are basically telling a clear story to your audience through your body and voice.
Here are some aspects to consider when preparing your performance:
1) Plot: What is your focus? What is the scene about? What is the plot? Think about a beginning, middle, and end. Make sure it accurately communicates the text.
2) Character:
What does your character want most of all? What is the tension or conflict he/she is experiencing? Why? This will determine the following:
- Inner and outer dialogue: What is he/she saying? What is he/she thinking and feeling?
- Action: What is he/she doing?
- Voice: How is he/she reading the lines? What is the tone, volume, and pacing?
3) Setting: Where does the scene take place? How does setting affect character and plot?
4) Audience: what do you want your audience to think, feel, and know? How are you best going to communicate this? Incorporate:
- stage direction
- gestures/body language
- special fx (effects)
- props
Other tips:
* thoroughly comprehend the text
* be intentional about your choices
* rehearse and perform
A few ways to dramatize a text:
1) tableau(tableaux pl.): a still image, a frozen moment or "a photograph". It is created by characters creating a picture or sculpture with their bodies in order to communicate an important idea, feeling, and/or action. Although there is no dialogue, you may include a narrator speaking. Also, you can create a series of tableaux that are connected, kind of like a slide show.
2) perform/act out: include dialogue and action
3) hot seat: students are interviewed in character
Activity: Now read the prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. You will be assigned a couple of lines. Paraphrase them then create a tableau.
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