Bringing your favourite book to life on stage

Choosing a story

This could be the easiest or hardest part to accomplish!

Maybe you already have a class book that you are working on this term, or maybe you would like to use this as an opportunity for children to share their personal favourites. If you are in the latter situation and you have time, you may wish to use some simple strategies to narrow down the possibilities and discover some basic ways to communicate through drama:

• In a given time limit pairs share the outline and best thing about a chosen book. Each pair must in turn then pick one of their two books to share with another pair and so on until half the class are sharing one story with the other half.

• As the groups grow, give them different ways to communicate the story: e.g. speaking in unison; using their bodies to create an illustration of the most exciting, saddest, important or frightening moment in the chosen book, giving it a title and bringing it to life for a few seconds; creating three illustrations from the beginning, middle and end of the story each with a title and a spoken – shouted, whispered, sung – line to accompany each one. This last suggestion is an excellent route into deciding on the bare bones structure of your retelling. It fixes the crucial points of the story in everyone's mind.

Retelling the story

Once you have decided on your story, work with the whole group to retell the story in their own words and using the words from the book. If you are going to use the spoken word in your staging it is important that your group work on the idea of listening closely, speaking as one, There are many ways to do this wither as a large group, in smaller groups or in pairs.

• One-word-at-a-time story round the circle.

• One-sentence-at-a-time story round the circle. Repeat this exercise, but with everyone in the circle spread out round the room, everyone has to ‘send' their sentence flying across the room so that everyone hears.

• Pairs retell the story swapping narrator after each sentence

• Small groups retell with one narrator with a small group of ‘actors' taking on the roles of everything mentioned in the story (including inanimate objects, weather, landscapes). As the story is told they enact physically what is being said. Encourage the narrator to talk slowly and clearly so that the group hears and has time to respond.

• Small groups retell the story with everyone sharing the 3 rd person narration and the physical enactment. There may be lines spoken singly or in unison, in character or as narration.

• Small groups retell the story with everyone using 1 st person narration (from ‘They' to ‘We', ‘She' to ‘I') and physical enactment. Some stories lend themselves to this particularly well, you be the judge.

• Small groups retell the story from varying points of view. For example Little Red Riding Hood from the point of view of the Wolf, or Rumplestiltskin from the point of view of the eponymous character.

Getting to grips with the language

If you wish to use text from your chosen book it pays to play around with the words so that your group feels totally at home with what they mean and how to say them. They need to ‘own' the language to find the fluidity and energy behind it.

• Explore the language from the book by selecting sequences that lend themselves to group retelling and print them out. Read the section out loud and as you read, ask your group to underline a certain number words/phrases that particularly interest them. Read the section out loud a second time and ask everyone to join in the narration when it comes to his or her underlined words and phrases. Read the section a third time with the group joining in on their chosen words and asking everyone else to echo the chosen words of others.

• Another good way to share set narration is to divide sections into single numbered lines of text and distribute round group. Everyone learns their line and the order in which it comes. Play with different ways to say the lines and positions from which to say them: as a whisper, crouched together in a group in the corner of the room; as a song dancing in the middle of the room; as a shout running around the room; sitting on chairs as if telling the answer to a teacher's question; in a den as if they are telling a secret, as if they are sharing a tragedy, etc

• Some books lend themselves to chanting or call and response (Bear Hunt, The Gruffalo are good examples) with a leader taking the main role and other voices repeating the lines. This lends emphasis and is good for generating energy and clarity in the communication of the story. Play with clapped or stamped rhythms to give your telling momentum and unity.

Creating the place, atmosphere and images of your story

• Ask half the class, one at a time, to build an image of one of the places in the story by adding their body to a group sculpture. Encourage interesting body shapes and connections between the bodies. Once the whole sculpture is complete you may pick individuals to come out and then replace themselves in a different spot or connect bits of the sculpture once they have viewed the whole picture.

• The sculpture can be brought to life using movement/sound depending on the locale being represented: e.g. the briar forest around the castle in Sleeping Beauty could be made like this and then encourage to grow and tangle when it comes to life.

• Small groups build a ‘Story machine' of the whole book or of one specific sequence within it. Each individual adds a single, repeatable physical movement or action accompanied by a repeatable sound or words to the whole machine. The machine can be turned on or off and can be speeded up and slowed down to signal the acceleration towards a climax: E.g. the moment when the woodcutter in Red Riding Hood discovers the wolf in granny's house.

• The whole group can create a soundscape for the location of the story through a sound circle game. Each person in turn makes a sound suggesting one of the locations in the story. The sound needs to be continuous or intermittently repeatable (the sound of the wind or the sea or a bird squawking for e.g.). The sounds join one by one to make a huge collage of sound that then reduces as it was built one by one. Experiment with combinations of sounds by asking a conductor to choose combinations of sounds to ‘play' together. The conductor can change the tempo or loudness of the composition. Experiment with playing each sound to a particular beat or within a specific rhythm and play with a few sounds made by many voices. This exercise can be explored using found percussion, using objects in the room.

In the end…

How you start and how you finish are both important in terms of the impact that your story will have on the audience. Remember that your aim is to tell them something that they may never have heard before. Don't be afraid to tantalise, to tease, to make them laugh or to frighten them! Above all, the success of your retelling will depend to a large extent upon the commitment and energy that you bring to your story. Give it everything you've got!