The Technology Gives Students a Way Into the Teaching Theatre with Video Games and Virtual Reality

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Meet the Theatre Meet the Dance Company Geek Out Freak Out Meet the Member Building Character Borough Play Teaching Theatre With Video Games and Virtual Behind the Scene Reality By DAN STAHL AcCng Choreography WED OCT 5, 2016 • BEHIND THE SCENE • 0 COMMENTS SHARE THIS Design DirecCng Musicals How local drama teachers use technology in The technology their classrooms PlaywriCng gives students a --- way into the Recent Comments: https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1533/teaching-theatre-with-video-games-and-virtual-reality Page 1 of 5 Discount Tickets for Broadway, Off-Broadway and off-Off Broadway Shows | Theatre Development Fund – TDF 10/12/16, 103 PM

As an arts journalist and K-12 curriculum classics. Mark Blankenship, TDF Stages editor writer, I constantly ﬁnd myself wondering on At This Broadway Play, Your Seats Are Supposed to Surprise You how the theatre can (and should) intersect with the rest of a student's schedule. That's Barbara Thau on At This Broadway why I'm drawn to STEAM. Play, Your Seats Are Supposed to Surprise You

STEAM is an educaCon iniCaCve that integrates disciplines: science, technology, Dr Bernstein on At This Broadway engineering, the arts, and math. Advocates like George=e Yakman, who pioneered Play, Your Seats Are Supposed to STEAM instrucCon in 2007 and founded the consultancy STEAM EducaOon, say Surprise You this combined approach increases engagement and helps students make Daniel P Quinn on Why Are Three connecCons between subjects. Theatres Producing the Same Brecht Play This Month? The drama criCc in me wondered what STEAM might look like in a theatre class, James on At Broadway's 'The so I asked Yakman. She told me about students at an elementary school in Georgia Encounter,' A Sound Is Worth a who created a musical last year about the diﬀering experiences between kids who Thousand Pictures go to a STEAM school and kids who don't. The kids rewrote popular songs to cover all the STEAM subject areas. "Funkytown" became "Technotown"; "Sexy and I Know It" became "We're MathemaCcians and We Know It."

Okay, so students can make theatre about STEAM. But what about using STEAM to make theatre?

That quesCon is right up Eddie Kim's virtual alley. Kim is the head of the Theater Program at the Pierrepont School, a private K-12 insCtuCon in ConnecCcut. In addiCon to tradiConal theatre classes, he teaches "video game puppetry," in which students take classic works and retell them through video games.

A familiar literary text – like Romeo and Juliet or "The Tell-Tale Heart," to cite two recent choices – provides the basis for the classroom's script, while games like World of Warcra; supply the sedng and characters. At a performance, audience members watch the story enacted on a projecCon screen. In front of the screen, the student-performers sit at computers, controlling the computerized characters and speaking their words.

A 'video game puppetry' performance

The combinaCon of classic narraCves and video games can hook young people otherwise uninterested in theatre. Kim recalls a performance his students gave at a public high school in New Haven about three years ago. "We're sidng there, and these kids are on their phones—they're almost heckling us. [But then] we start https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1533/teaching-theatre-with-video-games-and-virtual-reality Page 2 of 5 Discount Tickets for Broadway, Off-Broadway and off-Off Broadway Shows | Theatre Development Fund – TDF 10/12/16, 103 PM

telling this story from Ovid using [the popular video game] Halo: Reach. By the end of it, every student was completely silent."

One reason for the silence was the digital technology. "Through the medium, these kids who were watching us really engaged with the story," Kim says.

He has noCced this reacCon during other performances of video game puppetry. "They know these games, and just knowing the games and watching what we do, we ojen get kids who go, 'Why don't you use this game?' or 'Why don't you use this for that moment?'" The technology gives students a way into the classics and also a way into the performance aspect of the texts, he says.

Under other circumstances, though, technology can get in the way. Such is the observaCon of Karen Sklaire, a drama teacher at P.S. 2, a K-5 school in New York City.

As Sklaire sees kids increasingly connected to their devices, she sees "a huge disconnect" in them from each other and from their imaginaCons. "They can't tell a story unless it's from a video game," she laments. Her goal as a drama teacher is to change that by teaching self-expression and social skills.

A 'video game puppetry' performance

"I'm not anC-technology," Sklaire emphasizes, "But I'm more into in doing instead of seeing. Kids learning things on computers are not going to retain them as [well as] if they learn them physically." Psychological research on taking notes with laptops versus longhand backs her up.

SCll, Sklaire recognizes the value of technology as a tool for teaching theatre, provided the right things are used in the right way. Example? A performance undertaken by her students with the assistance of C&T, a UK-based company that plugs digital technology into drama and educaCon. Through the augmented reality planorm Aurasma, her students created "a whole digital story" from tableaux, expressing themselves with just their bodies. Aurasma recorded their poses and let the students watch what they had created. "It was a diﬀerent way of looking at acCng," Sklaire says.

Likewise, STEAM oﬀers drama teachers like Sklaire a diﬀerent way of looking at theatre. But whether students are staging musicals with songs about math or speaking the words of Niobe ajer her children are slaughtered in an Xbox game,

https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1533/teaching-theatre-with-video-games-and-virtual-reality Page 3 of 5 Discount Tickets for Broadway, Off-Broadway and off-Off Broadway Shows | Theatre Development Fund – TDF 10/12/16, 103 PM

they're performing stories. Isn't that the essence of theatre, whatever form – or planorm – it inhabits?

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Dan Stahl is a reporter and K-12 curriculum writer based in New York City.

Photos courtesy of Eddie Kim/EK Projects. Top photo: One of Kim's students incorporates video games into a theatre project.