Drama Of Ideas 5n6o1e

Drama of Ideas

"Drama of Ideas", pioneered by George Bernard Shaw, is a type of discussion play in which the clash of ideas and hostile ideologies reveals the most acute problems of social and personal morality. This type of comedy is different from the conventional comedy

such as Shakespearean comedies. In a Drama of Ideas there is a little action but discussion. Characters are only the vehicles of ideas. The conflict which is the essence of drama is reached through the opposing ideas of different characters. The aim of Drama of Ideas is to educate people through entertainment. Arms and the Man is an excellent example of the Drama of Ideas. Here very little happens except discussion. The plot is built up with dynamic and unconventional ideas regarding war and love. Shaw criticizes the romantic notion of war and love prevailing in the contemporary society. Unlike the conventional comedies, here characters are engaged in lengthy discussion and thus bring out ideas contrary to each other. Comedy of Humours

The comedy of humours reached the height of its success in the hands of Ben Jonson. Jonson tried to recall comedy from its romantic entanglements and to restore it to the position which it held in ancient Roman times. The characters in the comedies of Jonson represent certain well-marked traits which are known as humors. The boastful soldier, the clever servant, the greedy and

jealous husband, the gay young man, the dupe-such are the characters in Jonson’s play, Every Man in His Humour. Likewise, a vainglorious knight, a public jester, an affected courtier, a doting husband, and certain others exhibit their respective oddities or traits in the play, Every Man out of His Humour. Even in his masterpiece, Volpone, Jonson represents the characters of a miser-cum-sensualist, a clever servant, a shameless lawyer, a wiling cuckold who offers his wife in return for an inheritance, a foolish English traveler, and so on. This play is chiefly a satire on vice and has an obvious moral purpose. In fact, a moral purpose is the dominant motive behind Jonson’s comedy of humours. Comedy of Manners or Artificial comedy

The comedy of manners, which is often described as artificial comedy, arose during the Restoration. The comic dramatists of this period wrote plays picturing the external details of life, the fashions of the time, its manners, its modes of speech, its interests. Their characters were chiefly men and women of fashion, and their plots and love-intrigues are developed with clever and witty dialogue. The scenes are laid in the drawingrooms, the coffee-houses, the streets, and the parks and gardens of London. The Puritans had suppressed drama which was revived with the Restoration of monarchy in England. The comic plays of this period represent the reaction of the public and the authors against Puritanism. These plays represent social institutions especially marriage, in a ridiculous light. Social conventions are attacked and mocked at chiefly for the sake of witty raillery or to give point to an intrigue. The first of this

school of comic dramatists was Sir George Etherege, who established the comedy of manners. He was followed by William Wycherley, William Congreve, Sir John Vanbugh, and George Farquhar. Congreve is easily the greatest writer of the comedy of manners. His masterpiece, the way of the world, carries the interest of dialogue, the verbal exchanges between character and character, to its extreme development. As a painter of the contemporary life of fashion and the manners of fashionable society, Congreve has no equal his use of irony and paradox in exposing the foibles of society masterly and his wit is unsured. Posted by S.M Muzahidul Islam at 01:00 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Drama

The Revival of the comedy of Manners or the Artificial Comedy by Goldsmith and Sheridan

Goldsmith and Sheridan wrote comedies free from the sentimentality and the moralizing which had overwhelmed the comic plays of their time. They did so by reviving the comedy of manners or artificial comedy of the Restoration. In this context,Sheridan occupies a commanding position with his plays, The Rivals and The School for sandal, the letter being his masterpiece. The school for scandal indeed represents almost the perfection of artificial comedy. This play reveals the selfishness, envy, and hypocrisy of the society of the time with a remarkable skill and a sure knowledge of theatrical effect. Here Sheridan captured the current forms of fashionable speech and heightened them with fine phrases and sustained wit. He built up a comedy of manners or an artificial comedy with more striking situations in it than any other play in English. It is without dispute the most

brilliant artificial comedy written in the eighteenth century, and one of the most successful ever produced on the stage. It gives us a satirical picture of the contemporary scene-the love of fashion, the extravagant habits of young men, the love-intrigues, the exorbitant rates of interest charged by money-lenders, and the hypocrisy of fashionable men and woman. The author also pokes fun at contemporary journalism, with sarcastic references to “The Town and country Magazine” and to Mr. Snake.”

Sentimental Comedy

Sentimental comedy, a dramatic genre of the 18th century, denoting plays in which middle-class protagonists triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials.

Such comedy aimed at producing tears rather than laughter. Sentimental comedies reflected contemporary philosophical conceptions of humans as inherently good but capable of being led astray through bad example. By an appeal to his noble sentiments, a man could be reformed and set back on the path of virtue. Although the plays contained characters whose natures seemed overly virtuous, and whose trials were

too easily resolved, they were nonetheless accepted by audiences as truthful representations of the human predicament.

Sentimental Comedy of the 17th and 18th Centuries

The Restoration comic style collapsed around the end of the 17th century, when the satiric vision gave place to a sentimental one. Jeremy Collier’s Short view of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, published in 1698, signaled the public opposition to the real or fancied improprieties of plays staged during the previous three decades. “The business of plays is to recommend Virtue, and discountenance Vice”: so runs the opening sentence of

Collier’s attack. No Restoration comic dramatist ever conceived of his function in quite these . “It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of humankind,” Congreve had written a few years earlier (in the dedication to The Double-Dealer). Though Congreve may be assumed to imply—in accordance with the

time-honored theory concerning the didactic end of comedy— that the comic dramatist paints the vices and follies of humankind for the purpose of correcting them through ridicule, he is, nonetheless, silent on this point. Collier’s assumption that all plays must recommend virtue and discountenance vice has the effect of imposing on comedy the same sort of moral levy that critics such as Thomas Rymer were imposing on tragedy in their demand that it satisfy poetic justice.

At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a blending of the tragic and comic genres that, in one form or another, had been attempted throughout the preceding century. The vogue tragic comedy may be said to have been launched in England with the publication of John Fletcher’s Faithfull Shepherdess (c. 1608), an imitation of the Pastor fido, by the Italian poet Battista Guarini. In his Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), Guarini had argued the distinct nature of the genre, maintaining it to be a third poetic kind, different from either the comic or the tragic. Tragicomedy, he wrote, takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death, and from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive,

modest amusement, feigned difficulty, and happy reversal. Fletcher adapted this statement in the address “To the Reader” that prefaces The Faith-full Shepherdess.

The form quickly established itself on the English stage, and, through the force of such examples as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Plasterer (1610) and A King and No King (1611) and a long sequence of Fletcher’s unaided tragicomedies, it prevailed during the 20 years before the closing of the theaters in 1642. The taste for tragicomedy continued unabated at the Restoration, and its influence was so pervasive that during the closing decades of the century the form began to be seen in plays that were not, at least by authorial designation, tragicomedies. Its effect on tragedy can be seen not only in the tendency, always present on the English stage, to mix scenes of mirth with more solemn matters but also in the practice of providing tragedy with a double ending (a fortunate one for the virtuous, an unfortunate one for the vicious), as in Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe (1675) or Congreve’s Mourning Bride (1697). The general lines separating the tragic and comic genres began to break down, and that which is high, serious, and capable of arousing pathos could exist in the same play with what is low, ridiculous, and capable of arousing derision. The next step in the process came when Sir Richard Steele, bent on reforming

comedy for didactic purposes, produced The Conscious Lovers(1722) and provided the English stage with an occasion when the audience at a comedy could derive its chief pleasure not from laughing but from weeping. It wept in the delight of seeing virtue rewarded and young love come to flower after parental opposition had been overcome. Comedy of the sort inaugurated by The Conscious Lovers continued to represent the affairs of private life, as comedy had always done, but with a seriousness hitherto unknown; and the traditionally low personages of comedy now had a capacity for feeling that bestowed on them a dignity previously reserved for the personages of tragedy.

This trend in comedy was part of a wave of egalitarianism that swept through 18th-century political and social thought. It was matched by a corresponding trend in tragedy, which increasingly selected its subjects from the affairs of private men and women in ordinary life, rather than from the doings of the great. The German dramatist Gotthold Lessing wrote that the misfortunes of those whose circumstances most resemble those of the audience must naturally penetrate most deeply into its heart, and his own Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is an example of the new serious comedy. The capacity to feel, to sympathize with, and to be affected by the plight of a fellow

human being without regard for rank in the world’s esteem became the measure of one’s humanity. It was a bond that united the fraternity of humankind in an aesthetic revolution that preceded the political revolutions of the 18th century. In literature, this had the effect of hastening the movement toward a more realistic representation of reality, whereby the familiar events of common life are treated “seriously and problematically” (in the phrase of the critic Erich Auerbach, who traced the process in his book Mime-sis [1946]). The results may be seen in novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela(1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) and in middle-class tragedies such as George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) in England; in the comedie larmoyante (“tearful comedy”) in ; in Carlo Goldoni’s efforts to reform the comedian dell’arte and replace it with a more naturalistic comedy in the Italian theater; and in the English sentimental comedy, exemplified in its full-blown state by plays such as Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768) and Richard Cumberland’s West Indian (1771). Concerning the sentimental comedy, it must be noted that it is only in the matter of appropriating for the bourgeoisie a seriousness of tone and a dignity of representational style previously considered the exclusive property of the nobility that the form can be said to stand in any significant relationship to the development of a more realistic mimetic mode than the traditional tragic and comic ones. The plots of sentimental

comedy are as contrived as anything in Plautus and Terence (which with their fondness for foundling heroes who turn out to be long-lost sons of rich merchants, they often resemble); and with their delicate feelings and genteel moral atmosphere, comedies of this sort seem as affected in matters of sentiment as Restoration comedy seems in matters of wit.

Oliver Goldsmith, in his “A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” (1773), noted the extent to which the comedy in the England of his day had departed from its traditional purpose, the excitation of laughter by exhibiting the follies of the lower part of humankind. He questioned whether an exhibition of its follies would not be preferable to a detail of its calamities. In sentimental comedy, Goldsmith continued, the virtues of private life were exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of humankind generated interest in the piece. Characters in these plays were almost always good; if they had faults, the spectator was expected not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts. Thus, according to Goldsmith, folly was commended instead of being ridiculed. Goldsmith concluded by labeling sentimental comedy a “species of bastard tragedy,” “a kind of mulish production,” a designation that ironically brings to mind Guarini’s comparison

of tragicomedy in its uniqueness (a product of comedy and tragedy but different from either) to the mule (the offspring of the horse and the ass but itself neither one nor the other). The production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) briefly reintroduced comic gaiety to the English stage; by the end of the decade, Sheridan’s dramatic burlesque, The Critic (first performed 1779), had appeared, with its parody of contemporary dramatic fashions, the sentimental included. But this virtually concluded Sheridan’s career as a dramatist. Goldsmith had died in 1774, and the sentimental play was to continue to govern the English comic stage for over a century to come. The Relevance of the Theory of Catharsis in the Present Scenario

Since Aristotle, in Europe tragedy has never been a drama of despair, causeless death or chance-disaster. The drama that only paints horrors and leaves souls shattered and mind un reconciled with the world may be described as a gruesome, ghastly play, but not a healthy tragedy, for tragedy is a play in which disaster or downfall has causes which could carefully be avoided and sorrow in it does not upset the balance in favor of pessimism. That is why, in spite of seriousness, even heart-rending scenes of sorrow, tragedy, in the ultimate pronouncement, embodies the vision of beauty. It stirs noble thoughts and serves tragic delight but does not condemn us to despair. If the healthy notion of tragedy has been maintained throughout the literary history of

Europe, the ultimate credit, perhaps, goes back to Aristotle who propounded it in his theory of Catharsis. Catharsis established tragedy as a drama of balance. Sorrow alone would be ugly and repulsive. Beauty pure would be imaginative and mystical. These together constitute what may be called tragic beauty. Pity alone would be sentimentality. Fear alone would make us cowards. But pity and fear, sympathy and terror together constitute the tragic feeling which is most delightful though it is tearfully delightful. Such tragic beauty and tragic feeling which it evokes constitutes the aesthetics of balance as propounded for the first time by Aristotle in his theory of Catharsis. Therefore, we feel, the reverence which Aristotle has enjoyed through ages has not gone to him undeserved. His insight has rightly earned it. Posted by S.M Muzahidul Islam at 12:18 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Drama

The Meaning of Catharsis

Let us quote F.L.Lucas at length on the meaning of catharsis: “First, there has been age-long controversy about Aristotle’s meaning, though it has almost always been accepted that whatever he meant was profoundly right. Many, for example, have translated Catharsis as ‘purification’, ‘Correction or refinement’ or the like. There is strong evidence that Catharsis means, not ‘Purification’, but ‘Purgation’ - a

medical term (Aristotle was a son of a Physician.) Yet, owing to changes in medical thought, ‘Purgation’ has become radically misleading to modern minds. Inevitably we think of purgatives and complete evacuations of water products; and then outraged critics ask why our emotions should be so ill-treated. “But Catharsis means ‘Purgation’, not in the modern, but in the older, wider English sense which includes the partial removal of excess ‘ humors’. The theory is as old as the school of Hippocrates that on a due balance … of these humors depend the health of body and mind alike.” (F.L.Lucas) To translate Catharsis simply as purgation today is misleading owing to the change of meaning which the word has undergone. The theory of humors is outdated in the medical science. ‘Purgation’ has assumed different meanings. It is no longer what Aristotle had in mind. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to translate Catharsis as ‘moderating’ or ‘tempering’ of the ions. But such translation, as F.L.Lucas suggests, ‘keeps the sense but loses the metaphor’. However, when it is not possible to keep up both, the meaning and the metaphor, it is better to maintain the meaning and sacrifice the metaphor in translating Catharsis as ‘moderating’ or ‘tempering’. The ions to be moderated are those of pity and fear. The pity and fear to be moderated is, again, of specific kinds. There can never be an excess in the pity that results into a useful action. But there can be too much of pity as an intense and helpless feeling, and there can be also too much of self-pity which is not a praise-worthy virtue. The Catharsis or moderation of such forms of pity ought to be achieved in the theatre or otherwise when possible, for such moderation keeps

the mind in a healthy state of balance. Similarly, only specific kinds of fear are to be moderated. Aristotle does not seem to have in mind the fear of horrors on the stage which as Lucas suggests are “supposed to have made women miscarry with terror in the theater , Aristotle specifically mentions ‘sympathetic fear for the characters’. “And by allowing free vent to this in the theater men are to lessen, in facing life thereafter, their own fear of … the general dread if destiny.” (F.L.Lucas) There are, besides fear and pity, the allied impulses which also are to be moderated: “Grief, weakness, contempt, blame – these I take to be the sort of thing that Aristotle meant by ‘feeling of that sort’.” (Lucas) Posted by S.M Muzahidul Islam at 12:16 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Drama

The Definition of Tragedy

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in the language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgationcatharsis

Explanation

of

these

of

and

similar

the

emotions.”

definition:

The definition is compact. Every word of it is pregnant with meaning. Each word of the above definition can be elaborated into a separate essay.

All art is representation (imitation) of life, but none can represent life in its totality. Therefore, an artist has to be selective in representation. He must aim at representing or imitating an aspect of life or a fragment of life.

Action comprises all human activities including deeds, thoughts and feelings. Therefore, we find soliloquies, choruses etc. in tragedy.

The writer of ‘tragedy’ seeks to imitate the serious side of life just as a writer of ‘comedy’ seeks to imitate only the shallow and superficial side. The tragic section presented on the stage in a drama should be complete or self contained with a proper beginning, proper middle and proper end. A beginning is that before which the audience or the reader does not need to be told anything to understand the story. If something more is required to understand the story than the beginning gives, it is unsatisfactory. From it follows the middle. In their turn the events from the middle lead to the end. Thus the story becomes a compact & self sufficient

one. It must not leave the impression that even after the end the action is still to be continued, or that before the action starts certain things remain to be known.

Tragedy must have close-knit unity with nothing that is superfluous or unnecessary. Every episode, every character and a dialogue in the play must carry step by step the action that is set into motion to its logical dénouement. It must give the impression of wholeness at the end.

The play must have, then, a definite magnitude, a proper size or a reasonable length such as the mind may comprehend fully. That is to say that it must have only necessary duration, it should neither be too long to tire our patience nor be too short to make effective representation impossible. Besides, a drama continuing for hours – indefinitely may fail to keep the various parts of it together into unity and wholeness in the spectator’s mind. The reasonable duration enables the spectator to view the drama as a whole, to its various episodes and to maintain interest. The language employed here should be duly embellished and beautified with various artistic ornaments (rhythm, harmony, song) and figures of speech. The language of our daily affairs is not useful here

because tragedy has to present a heightened picture of life’s serious side, and that is possible only if elevated language of poetry is used. According to need, the writer makes use of songs, poetry, poetic dialogue; simple conversation etc is various parts of the play.

Its manner of imitation should be action, not narration as in epic, for it is meant to be a dramatic representation on the stage and not a mere story-telling.

Then, for the function/aim of tragedy is to shake up in the soul the impulses of pity and fear, to achieve what he calls Catharsis. The emotions of pity and fear find a full and free outlet in tragedy. Their excess is purged and we are lifted out of our selves and emerges nobler than before. Posted by S.M Muzahidul Islam at 11:49 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Drama

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Gawain and the Green Knight

During a New Year’s Eve feast at King Arthur’s court, a strange figure, referred to only as the Green Knight, pays the court an unexpected visit. He challenges the group’s leader or any other brave representative to a game. The Green Knight says that he will allow whomever accepts the challenge to strike him with his own axe, on the condition that the challenger find him in exactly one year to receive a blow in return.

Stunned, Arthur hesitates to respond, but when the Green Knight mocks Arthur’s silence, the king steps forward to take the challenge. As soon as Arthur grips the Green Knight’s axe, Sir Gawain leaps up and asks to take the challenge himself. He takes hold of the axe and, in one deadly blow,

cuts off the knight’s head. To the amazement of the court, the nowheadless Green Knight picks up his severed head. Before riding away, the head reiterates the of the pact, reminding the young Gawain to seek him in a year and a day at the Green Chapel. After the Green Knight leaves, the company goes back to its festival, but Gawain is uneasy.

Time es, and autumn arrives. On the Day of All Saints, Gawain prepares to leave Camelot and find the Green Knight. He puts on his best armor, mounts his horse, Gringolet, and starts off toward North Wales, traveling through the wilderness of northwest Britain. Gawain encounters all sorts of beasts, suffers from hunger and cold, and grows more desperate as the days . On Christmas Day, he prays to find a place to hear Mass, then looks up to see a castle shimmering in the distance. The lord of the castle welcomes Gawain warmly, introducing him to his lady and to the old woman who sits beside her. For sport, the host (whose name is later revealed to be Bertilak) strikes a deal with Gawain: the host will go out hunting with his men every day, and when he returns in the evening, he will exchange his winnings for anything Gawain has managed to acquire by staying behind at the castle. Gawain happily agrees to the pact, and

goes

to

bed.

The first day, the lord hunts a herd of does, while Gawain sleeps late in his bedchambers. On the morning of the first day, the lord’s wife sneaks into Gawain’s chambers and attempts to seduce him. Gawain puts her off, but before she leaves she steals one kiss from him. That evening, when the host gives Gawain the venison he has captured, Gawain kisses him, since he has won one kiss from the lady. The second day, the lord hunts a wild boar. The lady again enters Gawain’s chambers, and this time she kisses Gawain twice. That evening Gawain gives the host the two kisses in exchange

for

the

boar’s

head.

The third day, the lord hunts a fox, and the lady kisses Gawain three times. She also asks him for a love token, such as a ring or a glove. Gawain refuses to give her anything and refuses to take anything from her, until the lady mentions her girdle. The green silk girdle she wears around her waist is no ordinary piece of cloth, the lady claims, but possesses the magical ability to protect the person who wears it from death. Intrigued, Gawain accepts the cloth, but when it comes time to exchange his

winnings with the host, Gawain gives the three kisses but does not mention the lady’s green girdle. The host gives Gawain the fox skin he won that day, and they all go to bed happy, but weighed down with the fact that Gawain must leave for the Green Chapel the following morning to find the

Green

Knight.

New Year’s Day arrives, and Gawain dons his armor, including the girdle, then sets off with Gringolet to seek the Green Knight. A guide accompanies him out of the estate grounds. When they reach the border of the forest, the guide promises not to tell anyone if Gawain decides to give up the quest. Gawain refuses, determined to meet his fate head-on. Eventually, he comes to a kind of crevice in a rock, visible through the tall grasses. He hears the whirring of a grindstone, confirming his suspicion that this strange cavern is in fact the Green Chapel. Gawain calls out, and the Green Knight emerges to greet him. Intent on fulfilling the of the contract, Gawain presents his neck to the Green Knight, who proceeds to feign two blows. On the third feint, the Green Knight nicks Gawain’s neck, barely drawing blood. Angered, Gawain shouts that their contract has been met, but

the

Green

Knight

merely

laughs.

The Green Knight reveals his name, Bertilak, and explains that he is the lord of the castle where Gawain recently stayed. Because Gawain did not honestly exchange all of his winnings on the third day, Bertilak drew blood on his third blow. Nevertheless, Gawain has proven himself a worthy knight, without equal in all the land. When Gawain questions Bertilak further, Bertilak explains that the old woman at the castle is really Morgan le Faye, Gawain’s aunt and King Arthur’s half sister. She sent the Green Knight on his original errand and used her magic to change Bertilak’s appearance. Relieved to be alive but extremely guilty about his sinful failure to tell the whole truth, Gawain wears the girdle on his arm as a reminder of his own failure. He returns to Arthur’s court, where all the knights Gawain, wearing girdles on their arms to show their . Posted by S.M Muzahidul Islam at 13:45 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Drama

Saturday, 9 June 2012

Types of Drama

There are many forms of Drama. Here is a non-exhaustive list with a simple explanation of each:

Improvisation / Let's Pretend

A scene is set, either by the teacher or the children, and then with little or no time to prepare a script the students perform before the class.

Role Plays

Students are given a particular role in a scripted play. After rehearsal the play is performed for the class, school or parents.

Mime

Children use only facial expressions and body language to on a message script to the rest of the class.

Masked Drama

The main props are masks. Children then feel less inhibited to perform and overact while participating in this form of drama. Children are given specific parts to play with a formal script. Using only their voices they must create the full picture for the rest of the class. Interpreting content and expressing it using only the voice.

Puppet Plays

Children use puppets to say and do things that they may feel too inhibited to say or do themselves.

Performance Poetry

While reciting a poem the children are encourage to act out the story from the poem.

Radio Drama

Similar to script reading with the addition of other sound affects, The painting of the mental picture is important

There are several other types of Drama referred to in the SACSA Framework

Posted by S.M Muzahidul Islam at 08:18 No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Drama

What is Drama

Drama is a unique tool to explore and express human feeling. Drama is an essential form of behavior in all cultures, it is a fundamental human activity.

In this site we are investigating the benefits Drama can have on child development when applied functionally within a primary classroom. Drama has the potential, as a diverse medium, to enhance cognitive, effective and motor development.

A high degree of thinking, feeling and moving is involved and subsequently aids in the development of skills for all other learning within and outside of schools (transfer of learning).

Drama is a discrete skill in itself (acting, theater, refined skill), and therefore it is offered as a 'subject' in secondary school. However Drama is also a tool which is flexible, versatile and applicable among all areas of the curriculum. Through its application as a tool in the primary classroom, Drama can be experienced by all children.Drama assists in the development of :

the use of imagination powers of creative self expression decision making and problem solving skills and understanding of self and the world self confidence, a sense of worth and respect and consideration for others. The SACSA Framework defines Drama as: 'the enactment of real and imagined events through role-play, play making and performances, enabling individuals and groups to explore, shape and represent ideas, feelings and their consequences in symbolic or dramatic form.'