Approximately 20-25 minutes
About this Strategy:
This strategy serves as an entry point for students to think about places that they consider places of “home” through movement/embodiment and a performance collaborative performance. Using the classroom space as a map, students begin to think about the various places they call home (literally or figuratively) and map that out geographically across the room. This pre-show activity invites students to think about themselves before making connections with Kemi and how she identifies places of “home”.
Grade Level: 4-6th Grade
Essential Question: How do our embodied maps of home relate to personal identity and community?
Objectives:
- Embody where different places that feel like home might be placed on a geographical map
- Memorize an embodied sequence of gestures individually and in a small group represent the theme of home
- Describe how their places of home relate to their personal identity and community
TEKS:
- A.I.S.D. SEL TEKS: Goal III Elementary: Develop social awareness skills needed to establish and maintain positive relationships; Objective D: Student can read social cues..
- Identifies emotions by body language and facial expressions
- Identifies ways that social and cultural cues may be different among various families and social groups
- 5TH Grade Theatre TEKS: (b) Knowledge and skills: (3) Creative expression: production. The student applies design, directing, and theatre production concepts and skills. The student is expected to:
- (B) alter space appropriately to create suitable performance environments for playmaking;
- (C) plan dramatizations collaboratively; and
- (D) interact cooperatively with others in dramatizations.
Space: Open Area
Participants: 6+ Students
Directions:
First define the outer boundaries of a large, open, playing space and orient a compass rose on the space for north, south, east, and west; this is the imagined “map.”
Introduce the strategy: I will give a series of prompts. You will respond by placing yourself as your answer on the map in the space that best represents your answer. Explain that the map is very flexible and space/distance between locations will have to be flexible too. Begin the strategy. If our current space is located at the center of an imagined map, please stand on the location – or one location – where you currently live.
Once placed, invite students to name where they are standing, where they currently live. Students never have to share, it is always an invitation to share.
Next, ask: If our current space is located at the center of an imagined map, please stand where you were born. Once placed, invite students to name where they are standing; some might shift in response to what others share.
Finally, ask: If our current space is located at the center of an imagined map, please stand at one of the physical spaces that you call home, recognizing that there may be more than one. This could be a place where you have spent a lot of time, or a physical space that you feel is “home” although you may have never been there. Once placed, invite students to name where they are standing.
Explore the strategy: Next, ask students to create a gesture, which offers an abstract or concrete representation of the physical space that they call “home.” A gesture is a short repeatable movement. Invite students to turn away from their peers to create a more private space, then ask them to work individually for 60 seconds to create their gesture. Then ask all participants to perform their gestures at the same time as a rehearsal. Count them down- 3, 2, 1, action! Ask them to repeat their gestures several times.
Next, invite each student to pair up with another person near them on the virtual map, and teach them your gesture. Then, put the gestures together in a sequence.
Finally, each pair is grouped with another pair. The group of four works together to create a final performance that includes all four gestures in a sequence of shared choreography.
The activity closes with each group sharing its performance of “home” for the full group, while the students watching respond to what they see. If you have less time or students are concerned about sharing you can have multiple groups share at once. Give them each a space in the room and count them down “3, 2, 1 action” to begin.
Then, invite the audience to “popcorn” (randomly share out) out one word that sticks with them–those words might be an emotion, an idea or an action that they saw represented or that they felt.
Reflection: We use a reflection model to describe what we did in this activity, analyze the different responses, and relate this strategy back to our learning community.
Describe: What did you notice about yourself in this activity? What did you notice about the group? What choices did you make to embody different parts of home?
Analyze: How did our map shift and change as we moved between imaginary map locations?
Relate: What is home? What shapes our understanding of home?
Final statement before engaging with the play, “Kimmy”:
Great work, everyone! As we are listening to the play, “Kimmy”, pay attention to how the main character Kemi is working through defining what home means for her and how that relates to her sense of identity and community.
Adapted from The DBI Network: https://dbp.theatredance.utexas.edu/content/story-my-name