Learning & Development: Drama - A dream performance

For one night only, 170 nursery children took to the stage to perform their own version of Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

The three to five-year-old actors from Active Learning's six nurseries in London gave the sold-out show to an audience of 350 parents at the Unicorn Theatre near London Bridge on 25 June.

The hour-and-a-half-long production incorporated drama, dance and music. It was made up of six acts, with each nursery writing, directing and performing their own version of one part of the story. Nursery staff accompanied the children on stage and provided narration for the action, while video footage from the rehearsals was played between each act and set change.

Active Learning managing director Bill Zuckerman said they had chosen to do 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' because they felt it was perfect for encouraging the children's creativity.

'The idea was to create a children's opera written by children for children. We wanted the action on stage to be driven purely by the children's imaginations and vision of the play.

'Music and performing arts are central to the learning experiences of children at Active Learning and form a vital part of the daily curriculum. In the past, the nurseries had been visited by instrumental performers and worked with opera companies on productions including Mozart's "Magic Flute", Prokofiev's "Love of Three Oranges" and Rossini's "Cinderella". But this year, rather than get involved in someone else's idea, we wanted the children to devise their own production.'

Story and song

Staff at the nurseries began by telling the children about the main characters and the basic story of Shakespeare's play. The play was then broken down into six manageable parts for each nursery to work on.

Charlotte Reed, principal of the West Hampstead Active Learning, says, 'We read the children the Usborne version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which is specially adapted for a young audience.

'When we first introduced the children to the story we found that even though they didn't quite understand the reasons for all the confusion in it, they were enthralled by the idea of dreaming, midnight forests, magic flower juice, fairies, a wedding, princes and princesses, and the fact that anything can happen when you are in dreamland.'

Nurseries worked individually on their act and the children's ideas were used to develop characters, dialogue and action for their part of the story.

Project manager Maddie Moat, who brought the six acts together, says, 'It really helped that the children knew the basic story of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" when developing their storylines and characters.

'The ideas that the children came up with showed us that they really understood what was happening in their section of the play.'

The West Hampstead setting, whose part of the story was set in a dream world, encouraged the children to use their imaginations by thinking about the things they would like to dream about and the type of characters that would live in the world described in the story.

'When we asked the children what they would like to dream, one of our girls said she wanted to slide down a rainbow, while the boys said they would like to see pirates and a pirate ship', says music teacher Erna Steenkamp.

'We also asked the children what characters they would like to be when they woke up from their dreams. A popular choice with the boys was a pirate and for the girls fairies. Some of the more unusual choices included a kangaroo, lion, a squirrel and a doctor.'

Mr Zuckerman says, 'Because the play is unclear as to whether the actions are supposed to be real or a dream, we allowed the children's fantasies to dictate the course of action. Some nurseries chose to feature a pirate ship in the forest with Puck, a trip to the beach, a visit from Father Christmas and a guest appearance from Ben 10, as that is where the imagination of the children took the drama at that point in time.'

To bring the children's ideas to life, the nurseries' art and music teachers helped them create sets during art sessions and came up with ideas for song lyrics, which were put to music.

Ms Steenkamp says, 'I worked with the children to help create the words for our part of the story. The children made suggestions about what they wanted in the songs and I used their ideas to create lyrics.

'I wanted to make the songs easy to remember and sing, so we used melodies from other songs that the children knew.'

Nursery staff felt the benefits that children gained from the experience came from the sense of ownership they had. Some of the nurseries said the project helped nurture the children's creativity and taught them the importance of listening to each other as well as further developing their ability to work as part of a team.

Encore

When the show was over, Charlotte Reed says, 'Parents really enjoyed the performance and we received a lot of positive feedback. The children loved being on stage and were buzzing after their performance.'

'The play was all the children could talk about at nursery and at home,' says Ms Steenkamp.

All the nurseries remarked on how much fun they had doing the production, and although it had been a lot of work they felt it was an amazing experience to be a part of. Active Learning now plans to make a large-scale performance involving their six nurseries an annual event.

Further information

• Active Learning, www.activelearningchildcare.co.uk

• A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the play by William Shakespeare, illustrated by Serena Riglietti (Usborne Publishing)