For almost every grade in most Waldorf schools, there is a class play. This is an exciting event and means a great deal to everyone: the teachers, the students, the parents, the extended families of students. The class play gives a teacher many chances to build the social strength in the class. It often also reinforces aspects of the curriculum. It changes the routine in a stimulating artistic way that provides relief from the steady rhythm of the days and weeks and months of the school year. This relief returns when the regular rhythm returns, and the class feels the ordinary soothing events of life replace the dynamic and artistic tension of preparing a play and performing it.
Plays in a Waldorf school are called “pedagogical” dramas for a very good reason. They are aids to the class teacher in developing skill and capacity in students, strengthening the sense of interdependence in the whole class, and brightening the creativity of the class through drama. Some teachers elect to do a play only every other year or every three years. This is entirely at the teacher’s discretion. A certain class might need uninterrupted rhythm or concentrated work on a subject, for example, instead of a play. The teacher decides on the play and the casting. Often an unlikely candidate for a lead part in a play or an obvious leader for a small part can surprise everyone, unlikely roles to all but the teacher! The teacher might be looking to stretch of a child’s ability.
The whole artistic approach for Waldorf teachers includes all the arts: music, drawing, painting, sculpting of all sorts (clay, beeswax, wood, stone), music making and singing, drama, speech formation, dance, and collages of several of these arts. The class play is one significant opportunity for a collaboration of arts. Sometimes teachers engage students in paper mâché, painting, dyeing for set design, or sewing and fabric arts for costumes. Music and dance are often included in plays. Singers and instrumentalists alike are included. The range of possibility is many in a class play. This presents a good rationale for doing a play, the combining of many artistic undertakings to make a beautiful play.
As with all the arts, confusion about the product and the actual goals can occur. We do get confused in Waldorf schools about the “best paintings,” and the “most beautiful sculptures,” or the most stunning main lesson books, the most beautiful singers, the most talented instrumentalists. Using all the arts carries the goal of clear thinking and deep inner experience during the experience. The displayable results are mere vestiges of the child’s artistic experience that brings the meaning home to the sensibilities of the young artist. The preoccupation with “talent” and “genius,” or the personality-driven aspect of our culture can make it very hard to stay with the essentials of why we actually do plays in Waldorf classes.
Of course, one wishes for a good play with high drama or effective comedy. If a casting decision is to give an unlikely candidate a prized part, the results could be less dramatically satisfying than they might be with the “most talented” in a class, but it might just be a very effective pedagogical play.
The ultimate satisfaction of a class in its play is the successful immersion into the characters and the story of a play. Once the play is performed, the audience’s comprehension of the story, the laughter, and tears the performers feel for one scene or another from the audience are like icing on a well-baked cake. Children learn to depend on each other in a new way from the ordinary, and students do change after deeply entering into a character unlike their own. Students find new voices in themselves, new motivations, new friends, a new appreciation for each other through interaction on stage. Sacrifice is needed for a good play: the sacrifice of one’s personality for another, sacrifice of preference for the good of the play, sacrifice of friends to interact with unlikely companions for the play, sacrifice of many preferences for the sake of a good play. And the sacrifice of repeated rehearsal might be the biggest sacrifice of all!
In the end, a class play is a lot of fun and excitement, the rewards of many weeks of hard work. Unlike other arts, it is such a social art and is shared socially with the whole community. Live theatre is always thrilling because unlike a film; no one knows what is going to happen on stage nor how the actors will react. Many is the time that class teachers instruct, “Whatever happens remember who your character is and respond in that character, no matter what!” It brings lessons for life with these facts. It isn’t so much what happens — things will always happen — it’s how we respond that makes the story so compelling! So, practice for the play begets practice for life, a gift well beyond a performance or two!