This unique one day course gives you an opportunity to explore many of the skills required in directing a play for the stage. With an emphasis on a practical approach, participants work with professional theatre director David Farmer in considering how to tell a story through performance. Topics include: finding ways into a script, blocking a scene, sub-text, character development, ensemble working, physical theatre, mime and movement. The day is suitable for teachers, drama workers, actors, amateur or semi-professional theatre directors and anybody else who would like to extend their skills.

This practical course explores the importance of drama for enabling all children, including those with Special Educational Needs (SEN), to learn through imagined experience.  Using role-play is key to them developing awareness and understanding of others’ perspectives and how to influence the course of events.  Drama also offers children, including those with SEN, the potential for meaningful and coherent learning that integrates aspects from across the curriculum towards addressing their holistic needs.

 A developmental approach will be taken, for working with those children at the earliest stages of learning with severe and complex needs to inclusive groups. The course explores the conditions needed to support meaningful learning through drama, and appropriate strategies (including teacher-in-role), with consideration of implications for planning drama activity for children with SEN.  

There will be an opportunity to review video footage of drama teaching, and to discuss issues for participants’ professional contexts. Although illustrative content during the day may be pitched more at children, the approach is adaptable for working with adults with a range of needs, and includes transferable approaches to planning drama activity and consideration of issues for working with groups with diverse needs.