DRAMA
There are many of the elements of drama that are eminently serviceable
in the child's literary and artistic training. One cannot use the word
"elements" in this connection without explaining that the word as used
here does not designate absolutely simple and primitive things. They are
elements only with respect to the complex whole which we call a drama.
The elements of drama are story, plot, character, impersonation,
dialogue, gesture, stage requirements; add to these the matter of
literary expression, a pronounced structure which divides the production
into clearly distinguished parts or acts; and add the further fact that
in all its developed and typical specimens drama is the expression and
presentation of a complex social situation, or the vehicle of a mature
philosophy. It is quite evident, then, that the fully constituted
literary drama will be both too complex and too difficult for children
under twelve, and in most communities for any elementary children.
But the elements of drama are not of necessity always in the difficult
and elaborate combination which constitutes a literary drama. They
appear singly and in simpler combinations here and there in many of the
experiences and occupations of the child. They may be selected and
combined for him in such products as will secure for him the distinctive
joys and discipline of the drama.
For example, there is the element of gesture, which in its elaborated
form becomes technical acting. In its primitive and fundamental form it
is instinctive with children--well-nigh purposeless at first,
uncontrolled and fantastic like the early activities of their
imagination, but easily organized and directed toward a purpose. The
first step in this direction is the game. Some of the charming
group-games the children learn even in the kindergarten are genuine
dramatic art. Such games are, at any rate, the first opportunity to
channel and to turn into something like artistic expression the
children's ceaseless activity.
We have all learned to appreciate the social and physical value of play.
We may well add now a respectful estimate of games as art. The
group-game may seem at first glance far from the child's literary
training; but, as a matter of fact, a good game which has in it, as a
good game always has, an orderly process and a climax, is just such an
artistic whole as a story. Besides, many of our best group-games are
accompanied by a rhythmic chant, often by pretty or quaint verses, such
as "Itisket, itasket, a green and yellow basket;" or, "How many miles to
Babylon?" or "London bridge is falling down." Acting upon this hint, we
may substitute for these verses more artistic lines, or we can furnish
more artistic lines with the fitting game. And these activities,
channeled and disciplined by the group-game, are receiving the best
possible training for dramatic acting by and by.
We must consider dancing as a form of dramatic gesture, and as a
training for it. We may all rejoice in the current change of attitude
toward dancing, which bids fair to replace it in education and among the
arts. We are learning again to regard it as such a controlling and
refining of motion as makes an appeal to one's sense of beauty, not as
the vulgar, one might almost say sordid, accomplishment it has been in
average society for many generations. The rediscovery of the charming
and simple folk-dances has given us a new art for the children, which we
may substitute for the unnatural waltz, and the mongrel two-step we have
been teaching them for years. A dance is a medium for expressing a mood,
and a means of communicating it; like the games, it is a method of
channeling and training activity. From this point of view one may see
its two-fold relation: on the one hand, to the child's natural
activities, taking them up, selecting among them, and combining them
into a beautiful whole; on the other hand to dramatic acting, training
and controlling the physical movements of gesture and pose and poise.
Ideally it may have a closer connection with literature. Not only may
dancing reflect a mood; it may tell a story or present a situation; many
primitive dances were of this kind. In a previous chapter I have spoken
of dancing as a method of motion to accompany spoken verse, as a means
of deepening the sense of rhythm. It is possible to represent in this
way, not only the movement of the words, but the mood of the lyric, and,
_mutatis mutandis_, the events of the ballad. I have seen the
fourth-year class present a little dance of "Hickory dickory dock"
invented for them by their teacher, and another class a little older do
a humorous dance of "There was a man in our town," than which two
performances nothing could be more charming. Of course, these were not
in any sense reproductions of the actions suggested by the jingles;
there was no gesture that told of running up the clock, or scratching
out his eyes; that would be the business of the old gesticulating
elocution so deplorable in the artificiality of its would-be realism.
The dances were felt to be merely the active response to the rhythm and
the mood of the recited words--bits of dramatic tone-color, as it were.
One wonders why all teachers do not make a game of "Charades" a frequent
class recreation and discipline, since it has in it so many elements of
educational value--the contributions to the children's vocabulary, the
sugar-coated persuasion to attend to spelling, the frequent need for the
invention of dialogue, the sharpening of everybody's wits, and, best of
all, the call for significant pantomime, genuine dramatic gesture, and
the fun, which is always educative.
When we come to the element of impersonation, we are nearer the heart of
dramatic art, and perhaps deeper into the circle of the child's
interests and instincts as well. Imitation is one of the absolute and
fundamental aspects of a child's activities. It is impossible to escape
calling it an instinct, when one sees that it is deeper and more
universal than any impulse or tendency. The interpretation put by more
recent psychologists upon the term and the fact of imitation throws a
new and grateful light upon it as a principle in drama. In the light of
this interpretation, we can not longer think of imitation as a servile,
and more or less formal, copying of the thing seen. We are now saying
that in these activities of the children, when they are playing horse,
or playing hunter, or playing soldier, they are not copying something
they have seen or heard of; they _are_ keeping house, they _are_
hunting, they _are_ marching and fighting. Not even bodily activity is a
more incessant and absolute aspect of play than this of make-believe.
Imaginative children, and those that have some variety of experience,
are rarely at leisure to appear in their own characters--so constant is
the dramatic and imitative impulse in exercise. Indeed, two little girls
I knew, after a forenoon of unceasing and strenuous impersonation of a
repertoire ranging from a door-mat and a cake of ice in the Delaware on
through the ghost of the murdered Banquo, were finally obliged to sit
down in utter weariness, when one of them suggested: "Now let's play
we're just plain little girls." In the same nursery of four children the
child who returned to the room after any absence always cautiously
inquired of each of the others, before taking up affairs: "What are you
being now?"
In certain hours of his study of literature and literary appreciation
one is ready to believe that this impulse toward impersonation is the
very fundamental fact in that appreciation. It is the door through which
one enters into the situations and feelings which make up the life
represented in the story, poem, or drama. This it is that gives that
strange grip of reality to literature; it is this that turns the
appreciation of literature into personal culture, so that in a very real
sense one may substitute literature for experience. It is easy to
utilize this passion very early, turning it in the direction of art. In
the kindergarten they have long known how to adapt it in the play which
they so wisely interchange and amalgamate with their games; and the
little pantomimes of "Bo-peep" and "Little Boy Blue," of flocks of
birds, of butterflies on the wing, and what not, are on the road to true
dramatic art. But, alas! this is cut all too short in the school--the
average school, where the scholars are converted immediately into the
veriest little pitchers--all ears; and, instead of being twenty selves
in a day, they are denied the privilege of being even one whole one.
This gift for impersonation should, like all their imaginative
experiences, be conserved by exercise and guidance; otherwise it remains
merely chaotic and accidental, and very soon the child himself is
ashamed of it and regards its exercise as a "baby" performance to be
left behind in the kindergarten. This exercise and guidance may be given
by training the children in little plays, which, to begin with, are not
much more than pantomime, but which add, as they go on, other elements
of the real drama--an organized action and dialogue.
Of course, there is the dramatic monologue--the recitation. But this
does not meet the needs of the class. It is impossible that all the
children should sympathetically impersonate the same character and
realize the same experience. Neither does this sort of exercise--the
recitation--give a chance for co-operation in the production of a bit of
social art; it does not give them the discipline of apprehending and
producing a large whole, and it tends to develop and foster an
unendurable kind and degree of egoism.
Where are we to get these plays, since there are practically none of
respectable literary quality ready to our hand? One must say
"practically none," because there are a few in print which can be used,
chiefly dramatizations of folk- and fairy-tales. But, for the most part,
and just as it should be, the teacher and the class will have to make
their own plays, until in the eighth grade or thereabouts they are ready
for some literary drama. As will be pointed out later, these
co-operatively produced dramas constitute the best possible return which
the children can make of their literary training, and at the same time
the best possible means of securing their apprehension of the story they
use; since in recasting a story as a play they will come to know it as
plot, as activity of persons, and as a structure made up of essential
parts.
Almost the first thing the child sees is the fact that there is
something organic and necessary about these divisions and subdivisions.
He sees them separate themselves out from the narrative as things in
themselves, and then reunite to form a complete whole again. It matters
not whether the story be one that he has been taught, a historical
episode, or a story invented by himself, the emphasis upon structure,
upon organization, which is one of the elements of drama, will be
helpful, as a matter of literary training.
As to the dialogue--the actual literature of this communal drama--we
must be most indulgent, and on the whole uncritical. A marked
peculiarity of the dramatizations of the little people, as indeed of
those of their elders, is that they forget to be literature at all, so
that what is not dumb-show must be set down as noise. It is a
troublesome and delicate task for the teacher who is guiding them to
manage to give the dialogue a tone better than mere commonplace and
different from mere bombast. It is wisest, on the whole, to get them to
choose stories and events that will sway their dialogue toward the
bombastic and away from the commonplace; they will certainly be more
spontaneous, and probably more artistic. And it is easy to set into
every play some genuine gem of literature--a lyric to be sung, a little
story to be told. It is desirable to introduce as much music as
possible--really artistic little songs that fit into the atmosphere of
the play and help to create it; it makes better "team-work." A dance
too, always provided it harmonizes with the tone and spirit of the play,
helps the feeling of co-operative production. The children's acting, in
the sense of gesture and stage-business, is very likely to be stiff and
artificial. Marches and dances that belong in the play make an
imperative call for movement, and accustom them to action without
self-consciousness and formality.
The story, then, is generally given--it is something the children have
read, it is a historical event, though of course it may be furnished by
some inventive member of the class, or evolved by them together.
Whatever it is, it will in all probability not differ in any way from
the story of any narrative. The plot will be the plot of the narrative
story; it will be either an accident or a very noteworthy fact, if the
material furnished displays a true dramatic plot. There will probably be
no true dramatic characterization. The teacher cannot aim at it, and
must not expect it; though occasionally the born actor declares himself
and presents us "a man in his humor" in true dramatic fashion. But, on
the whole, we are contented if up to the time we are twelve or thirteen
we move about the stage, as the persons move through the story,
delivering ourselves of such dialogue as is needed to put the action
forward--and nothing more. It goes without saying that place must be
made for a large number of "sups." An army is a great device, for in the
marching and manoeuvering most of the class can manage to appear upon
the stage first or last. _Briar-Rose_ makes a great play for the third
or fourth grade, for every man in the grade can appear as a thorn-bush
in the hedge. There may easily be two different casts for every play.
Occasionally there is the opportunity for the whole class to appear in
character as audience.
It is almost impossible to say anything concerning the staging, the
theatrical side, of these plays that will be helpful everywhere because
the facilities vary so widely in different schools and different
communities. In general, it is best to have what answers for a stage.
There is some mystic influence in the raised platform, the curtain, the
proscenium arch that cuts off this performance from the rest of the
world and gives it at once the distinction of art. Every dramatic guide
of young people should help forward as much as possible the movement to
free drama from the tyranny of the stage carpenter, the scene-painter,
and the costumer. And with children as with the early folk-players it
takes very little to create the illusion. A feather in his head makes
the six-year-old a noble red man without more ado. A sash over her
shoulder converts a little maiden of the third grade into a haughty
princess. But the feather and the sash are good pedagogy as well as good
art. An arm-chair makes a parlor; a half-dozen arm-loads of boughs makes
a forest. I witnessed a stirring performance of _Siegfried, the Child of
the Forest_, where the illusion of the deep-forest glades was created by
three rubber plants, a potted palm, and a sword-fern in a jardiniere! A
golden-haired Siegfried with an angora rug thrown over one shoulder, a
blackened Mimi with a mantle of burlap fastened about him with a
trunk-strap--the whole atmosphere of art was there.
As the children grow older, and alas! in most cases less imaginative,
they will require more properties. If possible, they should work
together to make the scenery and provide the properties, and should be
prevailed upon to make their own costumes. The wise teacher will keep
the costuming out of the hands of the "tender mamas" all he can; for in
most cases the participation of the mothers in this side of the
preparations, unless they are given specific directions and compelled to
follow them, means the introduction of the fatal spirit of competitive
finery. The children should be taught to see that the costuming is a
part of the art, and that everybody's costume must be brought "within
the picture."
Now, up through the sixth or seventh grades (this will depend upon the
average maturity of the children, upon the kind of culture in the homes
from which they come, upon the character and knowledge of the teachers
in the grades through which they have come) the plays that the children
have should be of the kind we have been considering--epic material, mere
direct story put together under the simplest of dramatic
principles--those of analysis into movements, of dialogue and of action
in its simpler forms. But in the eighth school year (merely to set a
limit), and bridging the children over into their ninth or first year of
high school, there may be a change. The child has gradually become
conscious of the complexity of life and human interests; he begins to
make his adolescent readjustment to the world, to realize in a conscious
way its history and its institutions; his own studies in history have
become studies in the interweaving of complex factors; the great social
institutions begin to press their claims and offer their attractions;
college looms ahead, conditioning all his undertakings; the church makes
its appeal or asserts its rights; upon all too many children the
institutions of business and industry make their call; in most children
their own moral and religious problems, and those of their mates, rise
to consciousness. Epic directness and singleness now no longer seem an
adequate picture of human affairs. It is now that the child has his
first moment of ripeness for the characteristic inner things of the
literary drama: the clash and combination of institutions; the revolt of
the individual against the institution, with his final destruction or
adjustment; the plot which is an interweaving of ethical and complex
social forces--the characters generally intricate to begin with, and
undergoing profound modification in the process of the action, different
from the static epic characters he has known hitherto. In short, we may
find that the eighth grade is ready for some specimens of that literary
type which is the truest artistic presentation of the social and moral
complex, the literary drama. Luckily, there are grades and shades of
complexity, and a wide range of choice as to the nature and difficulty
of the problems involved. One would scarcely encourage the eighth- or
ninth-year school children to attack the intricate adjustment and
interplay of _Hamlet_; he would not like them to follow the baffling
complexities of social, personal, and economic considerations through
_The Pillars of Society_. But _The Merchant of Venice_ offers problems
and situations which he can understand; in _Julius Caesar_ and in
_Macbeth_, in _Wilhelm Tell_, and in the _Wallenstein_ plays, noble and
finished dramas as they are, he encounters nothing that he cannot grasp.
On the contrary, the ideas and the situations are such as he readily
understands, and such as legitimately enlarge his horizon. The
Shakespeare, at any rate, will probably be studied as poetry, and the
children should be encouraged to act, in whole or in part, any play that
they can study as literature.
It may be that the facilities of the school will prohibit any attempt to
stage one of these larger plays. In that event chosen bits may be given
as dialogue or monologue fitted into a recital of the story, and a
description of the situation. The teacher should always remember that
the drama is oral literature, and the literature of it makes its
legitimate appeal first to the ear. Children memorize so easily, that
they will know the play by heart practically as soon as they have
finished such a consideration of it as enables them to read it
intelligently. If not, the striking and beautiful passages should be
deliberately memorized.
Should these dramatic performances be produced before a public? Most
certainly yes. Let it be however small a public--two neighboring grades,
invited parents and friends; but let the study and effort bear its
legitimate fruit in the public presentation. Only when we lead them to
turn back what they have gained into a community asset, have we done
anything to train our children in social art. And this is so natural and
easy in the case of an acted drama that it is a pity to miss the
opportunity. Of course, they must love the thing they do. It must be
made good enough to give, and be therefore offered. We shall gradually
recover from the fright we have been in now for some time as to the
children's desire to "show off." How can we be sure we should have had
any art, if this motive had not mingled with the others in the
production and publication of the art-product? Let us cease to give it
an invidious name; instead of calling it the desire to "show off," let
us call it the artists' passion--be he poet, painter, actor, what
not--to communicate, to turn back into the common life this thing he has
but drawn out of the common life to elaborate and beautify.
The child and the theater makes a difficult problem. One need not say
that a habitual theater-going child is a social, and most likely a
moral, monster. But children should occasionally see a play with the
pomp and circumstance of the stage. In the large cities it is not
difficult to find a play or two each year that it is good for a child to
see--something of Shakespeare, or some other heroic spectacle; some
innocent programme of horse-play and frolic; some pretty pantomime, and
occasionally a melodrama neither banal nor over-sentimental. If we but
realized the theater as an educational and aesthetic force, we might
secure many more such things by an intelligent appeal for them and an
intelligent reception of them.
After the children have had these few heroic plays we have discussed for
the eighth or ninth grade, they mature so rapidly that their contact
with the literary drama ceases to be a child's problem at all; it passes
into the field of secondary training, where it must, as things now are
in our schools, be approached from a somewhat different point of view.