Shadow Theatre
Objective:
to improve oral and written comprehension and production in Basque by means of narrative games.
Materials:
felt pens, wood, translucent fabric, black pasteboard, scissors, long skewers, bulbs, wire, and 4.5 V batteries.
Project:
- The pupils are asked to make up short stories revolving around characters born from their imagination or taken from traditional stories.
- The resulting characters will be grouped into stereotypes: the lead character, the baddie, the goodie, the mysterious person, the alter-ego, the conscience and the friend.
- Drawings are made with scenes from these stories as are simplified portraits of the characters.
- To transfer the characters to the shadow theatre, pupils must remember the aesthetic simplicity and formal radicalness of the genre.
- The characters are cut out in silhouette-form from black pasteboard. They are glued to a wooden skewer so that they can be moved around.
- A piece of translucent cloth is fixed to a wooden frame to create the stage.
- For the light, the group can be asked to make simple electric circuits by connecting a 4.5 V battery to a switch and a bulb.
- Playing with the distance between light, the screen and the silhouette, pupils explore the aesthetic and dramatic possibilities of the light.