It all began with one idea
That idea is that all children ages 9 - 12 love to act out. So why not give them a platform to do just that?
The principles and practices of Stage It: Making Shakespeare Come Alive in Schools have been in the works since the mid-1980s when the author first began experimenting with many of the ideas presented in the book and its support resources. Those ideas became institutionalized through Stages of Learning (1994-2010), a New York City-based nonprofit arts education organization founded by the author and described by Mayor Bloomberg as “one of the most effective arts education programs” serving the City. The organization’s primary purpose involved partnerships between classroom teachers and teaching artists who collaborated on play-making activities that culminated in performances as short as five minutes and as long as fifty depending on educational aims and resources.
Below is a video of the program in action. While Stage It uses Shakespeare as content, Stages of Learning employed content across the curriculum in addition to the field-tested Shakespeare adaptions in Stage It. The video below demonstrates AVI’s The Fighting Ground, which the children were already reading in class, and concepts from the science curriculum using acting as pedagogy for this age group in two New York City classrooms:
Concepts demonstrated: Legato/staccato speech and movement, choral speaking and movement, the rehearsal process, interpreting characters, and reflection.
While Stages of Learning relied on a collaborative process between teaching artists and classroom teachers, Stage It is intended for use by a singular teacher (or a cluster of teachers across a whole grade) with limited resources and little to no experience in theater. The underlying assumption is that resources for drama instruction are scarce to nonexistent in most schools. It is offered as a low-cost solution where even a teaching artist residency is out of the question.
With funding from over forty additional institutional funders, Stages of Learning provided collaborative drama instruction to about 3,000 students annually and 40,000 through its lifecycle. Stage It synthesizes the best and most transferrable of this work.