When  Purim comes around I always find myself musing on the meaning of performance and disguise. Purim is about digging deep within ourselves to discover those elements of our  being that are normally hidden in  everyday life. The idea fascinates me because , let's face it, we spend most of our waking hours covered in layers upon layers of protection shields to avoid the vulnerability of psychological nakedness. On Purim, however, we are asked to don masks and costumes, not to hide who we are , but to become more of who we are meant to be.

As a teacher of drama ( not acting), the possibility of contributing to our students' emotional growth through performance intrigues me. It is through performance that we become more of who we are. By pretending to be someone else, we discover parts of ourselves hitherto unknown or realized. I love P.S Baber's quotation about drama : "The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen." When we enter a theater we enter into a world within a world which engenders a magic and mystery. At the same time, we are asked to "willfully suspend disbelief" (the phrase coined by W.T.Coleridge) because what we are about to see will engage us in ways that our "real' life events  simply do not. Whether we like it or not, we become part of the drama on the stage and will continue to take it with us well after the play has ended. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create an EFL classroom in which the magic and real coexist, in which our students find a voice through drama and performing a myriad of characters?  Research shows that it's not enough to just talk about the plays. They must be experienced first-hand if they are to truly engage our students.

In The King's Speech, George resisted becoming king for several reasons. His main reason was that he didn't believe he could "perform" the role of king because of his speech impediment. When forced to replace Edward as king  he found his voice as he "performed" his coronation speech and with it the sheer joy of  discovering who he really was. The act of becoming king came about as he found his voice, not before or after, but during.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVcK0XEic3U.


Getting back to the EFl classroom, I leave with the following:

“dramatic activities help students investigate a subject while finding its relationship to themselves and society; moreover, they make students counter with performance of social roles they had never experienced before, with the corresponding language and communicative styles” (B. Robbins, 1988) 

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I expect you are wondering about the title of my blog. Not very digital friendly. Which is precisely the point. There's a little resistance going on here as I am also attempting to maintain a measure of sanity amid the onslaught of technology. But more importantly, I believe we must continue to nurture and develop our unplugged methodological skills in EFL . There are naturally several reasons for this. I'll leave that for next time. I'm still trying to just cope with the fact that I have a blog!