How Do I Love Thee: Play

Playful creations in art make me think of whimsical designs on sculptures and in paintings/drawings. Especially the Oaxacan animal carvings, which you can see examples of here: http://www.oaxacanwoodcarving.com/gallfamilr.html. They are animals carved from wood and adorned with abstract designs with bright bold colors. I love these sculptures so much! They are cheerful, happy and PLAYFUL!  I have had students create animals from carving floral foam in which we then paint in styles inspired by the Oaxacan sculptures. Art can be very playful.

My first semester of undergrad I sat in my ceramics class the very first day and the professor had a large amount of clay on the table. He told us we needed to become one with the clay. We were to get to know the clay and the clay needed to get to know us. I know it sounds a little “out there” but what happened next was very playful. We began playing with the clay. Manipulating the clay to make objects, walking barefoot on the table in the clay, writing in the clay, everything we did seems very similar to what elementary students would have done if they had the same opportunity. That is one of my clearest memories from this course. The opportunity to be free and explore the clay released all the worry about starting college and working with this new medium I had rarely worked with.

For my playful introduction I have created an activity using creative dramatics. I know I have mentioned using this before, but I love incorporating theater arts into my classroom. My projects have been based on the theme of color theory and to stick to this notion I have decided to focus on how we perceive colors. To begin I will group students into groups by color. (This is an elementary focused activity.) Each group member will receive a sheet to paper to tape to their shirt to visual categorize the students. The students will be addressed that we will be performing drama and they already know the rules about the improv: stay in character and on task. The students will be in their color culture located at different areas in the art room. The students will then take the personality of their color. They will discuss as a group how they should act by impersonating this color. For example, the yellow group would be very happy and energetic and the blue group would be slow and calm. After they had time to discuss I would instruct groups to interact with one another staying in character. After the drama we would discuss why the colors are perceived that way, and what it was like interacting with someone different from you. This could be a good social lesson talking about everyone being different and just because someone is different it doesn’t make them better or worse than you.