DefinitionsThe British Arts Council pamphlet of guidance on drama education, Drama in Schools
(1992), defines drama as an educational experience in terms of three activities: making,
performing and responding. Virtually all the encounters a child can have with drama
come under one or more of these headings, and all are essential if the adult is to gain
life-long pleasure from drama, whether in the theatre or through film and television.
Children at play in early childhood are already ‘making’ drama, when they improvise
stories and games with rules and allotted parts: a child putting her teddy to bed is
starting to engage in creative dramatics. At school, experiences of ‘structured play’ and
early ventures in classroom improvisation begin to formalise the natural impetus to play.
When stories are ‘acted out’, the child is performing. Whether or not there is an
audience is unimportant. Many teachers regard drama as a process, not a product, and
view premature involvement in theatrical performance, however informal and domestic,
as actively harmful. However, thousands of children begin to perform for a friendly
public of peers, parents or the local community at a very early stage. Later there will
probably be full-scale school productions. Simultaneously, the child is ‘responding’ to
drama, on television and possibly in the theatre, and should be aided to develop a
critical response. Drama in Schools observes: ‘Responding to the plays they see, or take
part in, is also an essential part of pupils’ drama education’ (Arts Council 1992:5).
John and Wendy in Peter Pan, and Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, are already
making, performing and responding. They invent the scenarios of their mini-dramas, act
them out, and also show awareness of the fictive convention they are using. When Wendy
says ‘let us pretend’, and Sara says ‘it is a story’, they are imaginatively committed to
their dramatic play while reserving part of themselves as aware spectators of its
inventedness. They are ‘responding to the plays they... take part in’, and so are learning
to be an audience. The children in the theatre audience for productions of plays are
learning the same lessons both directly and at one remove, in an advanced,
sophisticated experience of dramatic play: the experience of children’s theatre.
Clearly we need subsidiary terms to denote these varied experiences of making,
performing and responding to drama. Moses Goldberg, in Children’s Theatre: a
Philosophy and a Method (1974) proposes three terms which broadly correspond to the
three key activities, all of them under the inclusive heading of ‘children’s drama’.
‘Creative dramatics’ is Goldberg’s term for ‘an informal activity in which children are
guided by a leader to express themselves through the medium of drama. Its goal is not
performance, but rather the free expression of the child’s creative imagination though the
discipline of an art form’ (4). The activities of ‘creative dramatics’ lead directly on from
spontaneous play. They may include improvised dialogue, movement and dance, mime
and puppetry, the acting out of stories and dramatised response to poetry and music.
Their aims are not only imaginative and artistic but personal, including the development
of self-confidence and social awareness. Most of what happens in creative dramatics is
an advanced and structured version of what children naturally do for themselves.
‘Recreational drama’ is the term Goldberg proposes for ‘a formal
theatrical presentation where the development and experience of the performers is as or
more important than the aesthetic enjoyment of the audience’ (5). He includes ‘school
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