Theatre Games and Beyond: A Creative Approach for Performers
This handsomely printed book offers teachers at a variety of levels a way  of introducing children and mature students to the nature of play; and to  that end, Schotz collects and sometimes invents, a sequence of games and  exercises. The focus is on loosening people up, and bringing them out of  their shells, so that they use their imagination and enjoy the company of  others in rhythmic and creative ways, and learn more about themselves as  individuals and as part of a group. But Schotz goes beyond  superficialities. Through the intensity of the author's committment,  gestated over a lifetime of practical theatrical work and classroom  experience, he achieves a penetrating synthesis on the theme of "homo  ludens", man, the game-playing animal. He integrates, applies, and  explains, clearly, incisively, brilliantly.Schotz insists on calling his first unit "Group Orientation" and  on putting games of introduction and trust before exercises in sensory  refinement and feeling enhancement; in other words, making the group more  important than the atomized individual.The games start to create, enhance, and redefine the experiences  we make as individuals in social groups. In this sense, imagination and  creativity do not offer supplemental colors to the hardheaded  blacks-and-whites of the real world; they are the inner forces of that  world, the "dark matter" that constitutes 90% of the universe--not the 10%  of mass which is the visual (cash nexus) of the cosmos.However, I think the real worth of this book lies in its  insistence that teachers and parents guide children through love, a love  manifest in their participation in children's games, and with a constant  and respectful turning to the children for their ideas, their responses,  their input into the creative effort. The model of society inherent in  these games is indeed worthy of emulation. Let us play with it and start  to enjoy life by imaginatively recreating the world. --Professor Norman Simms, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand