The Role of Play in Dance and Drama

The Role of Play in Dance and Drama Student’s Name Institution of Affiliation Course Instructor Date Video 1 Response: Dance Classroom Practice Summary of the Role of Play in the Dance Classroom In the first video, "Exploring Drama," by the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority, play is the focus of classroom practice to capture the learner's creativity using imagination. In this regard, play helps the students reason with characters, feelings, and circumstances, making it easy for them to actualize abstract concepts. The teacher plans to play as a tool for acquiring knowledge, primarily through dramatic enactment in which students use their hands to communicate. Furthermore, the teacher designates play so the students feel free to explore and venture to make mistakes without consequences. This corresponds to Judith Dinham's concept of 'authentic arts education,' which embraces play as non-interfering with the learning process. According to Dinham (2014), play in this aspect means that the students can 'think with their feet' and be required to move and express themselves on the dance floor. As a result of guided improvisation, the teacher intervenes and invites the students to produce accessible and creative communication based on stimuli like music or a given theme. This improvisation enables students to move freely, and at the same time, they can learn and understand the fundamental aspects of dance, that is, time, space, and dynamics. Analysis of the Segment on Dramatic Symbolism One of the significant points the video demonstrates happens when the teacher is helping students use their hands to communicate various meanings (1:41). This is an excellent example of how the teacher employs symbolic play to facilitate creativity and problem-solving in class. The teacher allows the students to consider cued Scheffen and diversify the functions of the hands as the instruments of acting, thus suggesting how much nonverbal communication holds meaning. This activity resonates with “Delivering Authentic Arts Education” by Dinham (2014), which stresses the effectiveness of symbolic and imaginative play since it results in higher-order thinking capacity among students. In this manner, students are forced to appreciate and produce Gestalt quantities for language and other forms of communication in a movement medium that responsibly represents a community's symbols. Moreover, it enables them to search for more meanings in one sign, understand the dramatic aspects better, and develop their skills in proposition acts. The meaning that students make with their hands is also associated with the “transformative play,” mentioned by Robyn Ewing (2013) in “Creative Arts in the Lives of Young Children,” as play helps children to change their experiences and create new pathways of learning. Here, the teacher organizes this learning practice by allowing the students to 'play' with these propositions. They are not just informed as to what the symbols are to be interpreted; rather, it is a discovery made by a teacher. By using open-ended questions and encouraging the participants to share their views with the rest of the class, the teacher can make the students think about the different meanings that their symbols could portray. The guidance rendered here fits well into what Dunn (2016) referred to in “Demystifying Process Drama” as the teachers' focus on being guides and not mere trainers. It also enables students to self-organize since this method involves the kind of free exploration characteristic of drama education. Connections to Play Theory and the Australian Curriculum (v9) This theory on dramatic symbolism is most relevant to the Australian Curriculum (v9) for the Arts' learning area that involves creating, performing, and reacting to dramatic scripts. The play explores the dramatic conventions students are expected to use according to the Australian Curriculum. This scene illustrates how play can scaffold these processes because, as per the Australian Curriculum, Drama in the Arts refers to "students making, performing, and responding to drama" (ACARA, 2023). Moreover, through symbolic play, students understand how meaning is made and communicated in dramatic action, which is the core of the dramatic learning process. Play as a learning medium is also related to play theory because it facilitates m...