HIGH SCHOOL THEATRE

This lesson series invites students to create brief, original pieces of theatre about Environmental Justice topics utilizing poetry, monologues, expressive gestures, and group tableaux. The first two lessons invite students to inhabit the perspective of a non-human being through creative writing and expressive embodiment in order to explore the layered social & environmental histories of a famous local site. The second two lessons invite students to create Living Newspaper performances in response to local media texts detailing issues of environmental injustice. The final lesson in this series encourages students to brainstorm and enact their visions of an environmentally just and thriving future through a Performing Justice Project strategy known as Six-Word Stories (Alrutz & Hoare) which incorporates creative writing, expressive gestures, and collaborative devising techniques.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS):

Theatre
Creative expression: performance
(E) employ physical techniques consistently to express thoughts, feelings, and actions nonverbally.
(F) create, write, and refine original monologues, improvisations, scenes, or vignettes that reflect dramatic structure to convey meaning to the audience through live performance or media forms.

Critical evaluation and response
(C) offer and receive constructive criticism of peer performances.

ELAR
Creative Writing
(b) Knowledge and skills
(1)(A) Writes expressive, informative, and persuasive texts effectively
(1)(C) elaborates writing when appropriate such as using concrete images, figurative language, sensory observation, dialogue, and other rhetorical devices to enhance meaning
(1)(D) employs various points of view to communicate effectively

(5) Response skills:
(E) interact with sources in meaningful ways such as notetaking, annotating,
freewriting, or illustrating
(10) Composition:
(A) compose literary texts such as fiction and poetry using genre characteristics
and craft