Explore This Month's E-Resources - School of Drama: January 2024

Class Starters is a series of short, engaging, theatre-focused activities for students to complete in the first five minutes of class as part of their daily routine.

The class starters in this video focus on acting and include a variety of activity types, from analyzing clips and images to quick research tasks and discussion prompts. Each chapter of the video is a unique class starter, simply choose the one you want to begin the lesson with.

The Unlocked: Creating a Character series offers a range of short, accessible e-learning videos demonstrating how to develop an authentic and believable character. Each episode focuses on skill-related components and includes activities to check knowledge and extend learning.

This episode introduces script analysis and can be used alongside the Teacher Notes and Student Workbook comprising ready-made activities and assessment strategies for learning about how script analysis is used to develop a character.

The Key Concepts in Playwriting series offers a range of short, authoritative and accessible e-learning videos to introduce undergraduates to five aspects of playwriting.

This episode on plot uses clips from The Poltergeist to explore exposition, Pipeline to demonstrate how climaxes aim to resolve questions introduced to the plot, and A Doll's House as an example of rising action.

“As a director… you’ve got responsibility for plural mindsets that you have to excavate and make clear and make the case for”

Through the lens of her past experience, Polly Findlay reflects on her directing practice and how it has developed throughout her career.

Findlay compares the various routes into the industry, questioning how the art of acting and directing differ. Before investigating contemporary retellings of classical texts, using Antigone as an example, she cites how location and space have affected her definition of practice.

Bella Merlin leads a rehearsal of a scene from Emily Mann’s Mrs Packard using Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis technique. Merlin guides the actors through a few simple steps which include reading, discussion and improvisation, and intertwines the line of thought and the line of action to create the world of the play.

This invaluable learning resource and teaching tool was produced by the Theatre, Film and Digital Production Department at the University of California, Riverside.