Theater Comes to Groves Academy

This year Groves added theater as an elective class for both middle and upper school students.  Simon McAllister, the principal director of Stagecoach Theater, teaches three classes a day and offers after-school theater classes two days a week.

The theater classes have five main elements:

• Improvisation – where the students create their story “in the moment.”
• Character development – where the students develop a character while learning to understand themselves and other people.
• Voice & Speech – where students work on voice projection and examine the structure and systems used by the body to produce sounds.  Students also study individual sounds and sound patterns, as well as look at words, sentences and paragraphs to see how speech allows them to communicate and share feelings and emotions with others.
• Play reading – where students study classics and not-so-classics:  American playwrights, British playwrights, European playwrights, comedies and tragedies.
• Playwriting – where students combine all they have learned to create an original play.  By doing this students go from simply learning skills to using them in a fun and creative way!