Pedagogy forum week 4

I continue to find connections from the work we are doing in poetry class to my Drama classroom. Triggering Town is perhaps the best source for merging these two disciplines. I am presently teaching my unit on writing scripts from improvisation and other art sources. Something that is clearly defined in the Georgia Performance standards for Fundamentals of Theatre.

At this point, all of my students have created their own triggering town, inside this town we are exploring all of the possibilities outlined in the first few chapters of Hugo's book. They are creating extremely interesting and elaborate improvisations. Each student has their own town in which they live and for which they journal. All the students work in groups and decide democratically whose town they will improvise in that day. whatever material dialogue, conflicts, resolutions are generated from that improvisation then belongs to the student whose triggering town they worked out the problem in. Within these settings the students are producing far more interesting material and what's more they are recording the material in their journals.

My plan is to have them use this material to develop their scripts for short plays and skits later in the semester. This is an action based reasearch project so it is trial and error, but so far it seems to be sinking in.

Before reading Hugo's book I would generally allow the students to improvise within the same given framework. "Your in a house and the lights go out", I might have written on the white board, and " what will you do next." With the triggering towns in place the students are moving quickly toward creating their own problems to solve. Given the specifics of the invented town, with all of it's characters and the suggested ideas: "I have lived here all my life", "I am returning'

My students have presented improvisation material that takes place in China, France, Germany, Africa and cities small and large all over the united states.

Before when we explored a foreign country for example the students would talk about the country. In essence they were always visitors.
now they have a far wider reaching understanding of the closeness of humanity. One prompt on the board concerning these towns and the specifics of the characters and problems and how they relate to our everyday lives and our imagined lives produced the following insightful response from a student:
"When a teenage girl from France who has lived in Paris all her life is eating at a French restaurant, she does not talk about the great French food, she talks about her problems with her boyfriend. Maybe she has a slight french accent." to that I could only stand amazed and add simply one comment, 'Yes!' and "with the point of view of a teenage girl who has lived in France all her life."

Next week we will begin to do research on the countries and towns we have mixed and moshed to create our triggering towns. Hopefully this will help them understand what I meant by that french point of view. Ideally this will produce some very specific and interesting dialogue for their skits and short plays.