Theatre Games and Beyond - Softcover

Aschotz, Amiel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566080398 ISBN 13: 9781566080392

Publisher: Meriwether Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

A teacher's handbook of over 140 theatre games designed to stimulate creativity in students of all ages. More than just games, the book is bursting with lively ideas to make a class or workshop a memorable experience. The games progress from Orientation ("Face to Face", "You and Me") and Trust ("Catch Me Falling", "Lead the Blind") to more advanced games that develop the senses, coordination, and spontaneity. A section on characters and stories builds improvisational acting skills. All of the essential elements of acting and character development are explored. Sample workshops provide a guide for using the games. Anyone working with young (or old) performers in schools, colleges or community theatre will find this book a valuable resource.

About this title

About the Author:

Amiel Schotz has been actively involved in theatre and the arts since an early age. He was born and educated in Scotland, where his father was Sculptor to the Queen of England. He became an actor and theatre director at Glasgow University and later took his Master of Fine Arts in acting and directing at Brandeis University.
He emigrated to Israel in 1965 and has continued to direct and to act on both professional and amateur stages and on the screen. He took part in the first public performances of Theater Games in Israel. His poetry and other writings have appeared in various publications and newspapers. He is also an accomplished translator and editor.
For more than twenty years he has given courses and workshops in creativity and theatre games to groups ranging from preschoolers to old-age pensioners, from at risk children to professional teachers and actors. This book distills and concentrates his years of practical experience. Reading it comes as close to participating in his workshops as is possible without actually being there.

Review:

This handsomely printed book offers teachers at a variety of levels a way of introducing children and mature students to the nature of play; and to that end, Schotz collects and sometimes invents, a sequence of games and exercises. The focus is on loosening people up, and bringing them out of their shells, so that they use their imagination and enjoy the company of others in rhythmic and creative ways, and learn more about themselves as individuals and as part of a group. But Schotz goes beyond superficialities. Through the intensity of the author's committment, gestated over a lifetime of practical theatrical work and classroom experience, he achieves a penetrating synthesis on the theme of "homo ludens", man, the game-playing animal. He integrates, applies, and explains, clearly, incisively, brilliantly.

Schotz insists on calling his first unit "Group Orientation" and on putting games of introduction and trust before exercises in sensory refinement and feeling enhancement; in other words, making the group more important than the atomized individual.

The games start to create, enhance, and redefine the experiences we make as individuals in social groups. In this sense, imagination and creativity do not offer supplemental colors to the hardheaded blacks-and-whites of the real world; they are the inner forces of that world, the "dark matter" that constitutes 90% of the universe--not the 10% of mass which is the visual (cash nexus) of the cosmos.

However, I think the real worth of this book lies in its insistence that teachers and parents guide children through love, a love manifest in their participation in children's games, and with a constant and respectful turning to the children for their ideas, their responses, their input into the creative effort. The model of society inherent in these games is indeed worthy of emulation. Let us play with it and start to enjoy life by imaginatively recreating the world. --Professor Norman Simms, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

About this edition

• Publisher: Meriwether Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1566080398
• ISBN 13: 9781566080392
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168