Educational Theatre provides a spring board to connect curricular goals along with active learning. Brooklyn Acting Lab offers a variety of in-school residencies that can be tailored to the needs of your learners and your schedule. The classes below are on our regular menu — we are excited to speak with you about building a new cross-curricular program specific to your community.
Through a mixture of professional storytelling, zany characters, complex questions and challenging standards, BAL Teaching Artists work to weave playful, energetic residencies based on the needs of your students and classroom teachers. Whether it’s inhabiting colonial life or tracking weather patterns as scientists, we’d love to jump in with you. Share the questions you are looking to ask your students with us and we’ll craft a cross-curricular residency with emphasis on the Common Core and your needs.
This residency will invite students into the world of dramatic play through literacy. We will collaborate to explore the worlds of storybooks written and/or illustrated by a featured New York-based artist through games, exercises and art-making. With an emphasis on the basic structures of a story as well as music-making, this residency will leave your students excited to continue reading, playing and imagining for years to come. The residency will culminate in a sharing of the students’ own storybooks in a reading with the featured author/illustrator.
Storytelling and play are at the heart of this workshop where students will dream, write, critique and perform their own scripts in collaboration with our seasoned Teaching Artists. Throughout the course of this residency, students will be challenged to imagine new ways of telling their own stories through theater and drama with prompts, exercises and games. After crafting scripts, peers will be chosen to collaborate as actors and directors for several scripts chosen by our Teaching Artists. Students will be led in a professional rehearsal process beginning with character building and culminating in a sharing for peers. Special emphasis will be placed on writing skills that will be developed through creative, dramatic experiences and prompts.
This collaborative workshop will introduce students to the basic techniques used to devise a piece of theatre from a written text. We will begin this residency by carefully examining the literature your students are already exposed to and use it to ask them big questions which will become sparks for their theatrical inquiry. These questions will lead us to imagine the characters, relationships, events and problems offered in the literature through a theatrical lens. In our imagining, we will work to write scripts, develop characters, block a performance and share our work with peers and families as an interpretation of a piece of text. We will pay special attention to group collaborations, thoughtful reflections and engaging dramatic choices.
(6-10 sessions) Students will be introduced to short and long-form improvisation in this hilarious, heartfelt workshop. Over the course of the residency, students will master multiple improv games and use their learning as a lens in examining the world they are creating and inhabiting in their academic and social lives. We will pay special attention to encouraging and engaging each voice in the room to be heard throughout the process. Students will also develop a reflective practice of journaling inspired by a number of prompts throughout this course. By the end of the residency, students will pull from their writings and the audience’s suggestions to create an improv show for peers and families.
A school-wide musical can build community, showcase collaboration, highlight student achievement and underscore the importance of arts in education. Musicals are a lot of work! With this in mind, BAL is excited to launch partnerships with teachers and schools looking to put on full-scale musicals. Through these partnerships, teachers are paired with experienced theatre-makers and drama educators from the first audition until the curtain closes on the last performance. Teachers will be able to creatively engage with BAL’s Teaching Artists throughout this collaborative process on elements from blocking to choreography to scenic design. We will be present for each rehearsal and work to engage educators and students together in building a magical musical. Students will be directed by a theatre professional and teachers will learn the ropes of the complex world of children’s theatre production.
Alternatively, we are excited to collaborate with a school in directing a musical without a direct teacher-partner in the process. Our seasoned Teaching Artists will connect your school’s students and staff in the creative process from play selection to filling the audience as family, friends and community members watch your students shine.
Reach out to us today to discuss the ways we might best connect your teachers and students with the incredible possibilities a school-wide musical can present.