For Lewis Frost, educator and artiste, drama is more about living the experience of the story and thinking beyond scripted lines

While the general perception of drama encompasses light, stage and action, for Lewis Frost from the UK, its is beyond what meets the eye. An artist, educator and a dramatist by profession Lewis Frost worked extensively with the Dukes Theatre- in Education Company in Lancashire, which is where he realised that drama wasn’t just about acting. Today Frost is an expert in the use of participatory approaches to education and in fact has been running workshops all around the world on how drama is more than just a performing art. Working with a number of schools in India, he was in Pune at the Aman Setu School last weekend, engaging young minds and teachers, telling them that life is after all a drama in it’s own way.

Speaking about the different treatments of the art, he shares, “For me drama is a lot of things, but basically I use it as an educational tool. Drama is not merely about performances; it’s about experiencing the whole activity- living it through the shoes of the character and hence it is about doing difficult roles in a protected environment. I have been using it as a tool to educate young minds and make them think beyond the facts they are fed with.”

Talking about his workshop at Aman Setu, he says, “I took them on a roller coaster ride of characters from history, making them think like people from the past and analyse their actions. I made the children act like the Greek Gods –Prometheus and Zeus, we went through the entire tale and tried to think of actions of these characters objectively and then analysing them. I feel we can use drama as a tool to teach other subjects – like history and languages. Rather than just stuffing children with facts, we need to tell them the consequences of facts and that is where drama comes in handy. I guess that helps them appreciate different perspectives and become more objective.”

... contd.