To provide both an enriching theatre experience for students and faculty and new opportunities for women artists, the Department of Theatre Arts and Speech at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey at Newark held a competition for new plays by New Jersey women playwrights. The winning play, Leni Hamilton's "The Fortress," a story of…

Just as all perceptions are of figures differentiated from a larger background, a play takes place against the background of the audience's knowledge and feelings. While audience members generally bring to a performance a large body of background information--they evaluate the storyline, for example, using a lifetime of personal experience--at…

With five basic exercises presented in this paper as a guide, instructors and students can gain an immediate awareness of the performance and staging principles in Reader's Theatre which may be used creatively to visualize literature so that it becomes "alive" in the imagination of the readers as well as the listener. The paper begins…

The technique of Soundscripting, the addition of sound cues and sound effects to the canonical pages of any play, is flexible enough to be done at no cost or with all the advantages of modern media. In class, the use of Shakespearean radio dramas or comedies can be effective. The long-term process in class involves four major steps and may take…

To examine the current status of speech and theatre departments in small (1000 to 3000 students) U.S. liberal arts colleges, 24 colleges in the Midwest and Great Lakes areas were surveyed. The survey revealed that the colleges organized speech and theatre in one of four ways; they either (1) combined departments, (2) split the two into separate…

Intended for teachers of theatrical design who need to describe a design process for their students, this paper begins by giving a brief overview of recent research that has described the different functions of the right and left cerebral hemispheres. It then notes that although the left hemisphere tends to dominate the right hemisphere, it is the…

The skills of playwriting are correctable, the craft of playwriting is teachable, and the art of playwriting is encourageable. In the area of craft, students can learn through models how accomplished playwrights deal with plot, characterization, dialogue, and theme. For the first element, plot development, students can look at written models to…

Trends in the current job market in the field of dance are identified, and aspects, such as personal qualifications, training requirements, income potential, and employment possibilities, are discussed. Employment opportunities in the professional world, the field of education, and the corporate environment are explored. Career opportunities for…

An introductory problem for a theatre history course presents the process of group decision making and problem solving in theatre studies, encourages students to compare values when collecting information and making decisions, and illustrates the variety of dramatic forms, production styles, and economic concerns of contemporary theatre. Entitled…

The guided design approach to teaching theatre history encourages active participation in decision making while applying knowledge and learning subject matter concepts. The theatre history course at Rutgers University, New Jersey, uses this approach. With guided design, classroom time is not used for lectures, but is instead reserved for small…

This paper advocates the use in the college reading classroom of Readers' Theater (a medium in which two or more oral readers, without memorization, special costumes, lighting, props, or sound effects, through creative oral reading cause an audience to explore drama, prose, and poetry). Sections in the paper discuss: the definition of readers'…

An award winning project for incorporating economics study into the junior high school curriculum is described. As a joint activity of 3 eighth grade social studies classes, 60 students created a videotape program to teach and test 6 basic economic concepts: scarcity and choice, opportunity costs, productive resources, production, supply and…

Oral interpretation facilitates the learning processes of adolescents by making the presentation of subject matter more interesting and meaningful to them, helping them feel involved, and providing them with an opportunity to perceive literature in action. Narrative literature is a good place to begin oral interpretation activities, since…

Readers Theater, a combination of storytelling and dramatic elements, is recommended as a technique for use in the English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classroom. Among its advantages are that it incorporates four language skill areas (Listening, speaking, reading, writing), uses cultural materials, and motivates students by using language in a…

Popular culture genres of the mid-nineteenth century--the anti-slavery almanac, dime novel, panorama, and propaganda play--provide secondary school teachers with an historical medium to help students understand the conditions of slavery. Following an introduction to the uses of these genres in teaching, separate sections contain historical…