Drama Department
Community Drama
Community Drama has a great deal of benefits for the participants:
- It provides an outlet for self-expression and helps develop imagination and artistic awareness.
- It can be used as a tool for developing social awareness, mental awareness, self-knowledge, self-respect, self-discipline and self-confidence.
- It helps people learn to work together and co-operate.
- Role-play can provide people with a safe environment in which they can deal with real life issues in a non-threatening space and manner.
I believe that Community Drama is a unique and valuable tool for promoting individual and social change. It is a form of communication and expression that can often allow sensitive and potentially divisive issues to be addressed more easily. It not only allows participants to address any issues but also it enables them to have a voice – to be heard! This change and development within individuals goes on to cause social change. Through allowing previously quietened voices to now be heard in an interesting and creative manner, we are encouraging a dialogue within local communities and therefore promoting awareness and understanding between people and communities.
We must not forget that the essence of all drama work is 'play'. Letting go of our boundaries, fears and responsibilities for a moment and allowing ourselves a time to be playful, a time to find the child inside and explore the world with young eyes – "our childhood is old, it is now that we are young!"
Ali Franks
Drama Development Worker
Youth Arts Development and Community Drama
"Drama's language is simply the language of social experience – what it 'feels like' to be alive – borrowed and fashioned for other purposes. We can claim, reasonably enough that everyone has a basic proficiency in its grammar. Everyone 'improvises' from the moment they get out of bed. We all feel pain, experience joy, and learn to 'act a part'. The medium is also non-discriminatory. There is no physical or mental condition that debars entry to participation.
Those in wheelchairs, those with mental illness, the very young, those who are hospitalised or suffering from depression, none are excluded from working at grass-roots level. The medium is sufficiently malleable to adapt to different circumstances and sufficiently multi-faceted to contain appropriate strategies which will harness the strengths of and capabilities of different comers. And it can do this without losing sight of its core idea: the interpretation of experience through deliberate, playful enactment.
Drama is also appropriate as a specifically community activity because it nurtures values which are concordant with community ideals. These I would describe as broadly humanist; respecting co-operation, sociability and equality of opportunity while engendering mutual respect. The drama process relies upon the active respect of these values while the mechanics of drama encourage their promotion."
Taken from: "The Potential of Community Drama" by Chris Johnston (1998) The House of Games
drama projects
Find out more about all our drama projects in our drama
projects section.
Alternatively, visit our drama project archive section which gives details of projects from 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003.
buy now
You can buy some of our films here.
