Drama in Missions: Promotion for Seminar

Why Offer a Seminar:

There is much more to drama in missions than preparing a Mime. In fact, in some cases a mime is a bad idea!

Los Angeles is a cultural melting pot. We are surrounded with multiple languages, hand signals, body language, even dress. All of these elements are communication signals (and only one of these signals is verbal!).

However, our learning to cope with all the signals in our culture has been more caught than taught. If we don’t quite understand when someone tells a joke, or someone bumps up against us doing or saying something that strikes us as odd, we have learned to be patient. We wait to see if we will be able to interpret the signal another way. Sometimes, we don’t worry too much about these odd experiences or misunderstandings and we just keep rolling along in a fog of trans-cultural confusion.

HOWEVER, those people who live in cities and countries that are more MONO-CULTURAL don’t have this special ability to process different communication signals when we visit them. Therefore, when bringing the Good News of Jesus, we need to be very careful to deliver our communication in a culturally suitable way.

When using drama cross culturally, we need to learn how to share our good news and use the communication signals of the culture we are visiting. We don’t want to risk the chance that the heart of our message will be misunderstood. If we go overseas intending to share the gospel through drama, we don’t want our audiences to enjoy our visit merely for the experience of a cultural exchange.

Who:

Kimberly Creasman of Church Resource Ministries is a theatre artist and missionary who has lived in Asia for 15 years. Before 1997 she and her husband Jim worked in Missions at Rolling Hills Covenant Church. For 12 years, part of their role was in equipping those who went out for short and long term missions service. She studied Intercultural Studies and Drama at Biola University, with a Degree in Communications in 1984.

With her here over the holidays, we’d like to bring a half-day of exploration and application of tools to create drama for missions.

What:

In this four-hour introductory course, begin to learn how to locate, understand and employ suitable drama and communication methods for other cultures. Participants will learn from each other what has been fruitful in their varied experiences, hear of new forms of drama that involve audience participation, hear of dramas that backfired, see video examples of drama used in outreach around the world and explore theatre games which work in settings where the audience and team does not have a translator! Those who want to follow up with research and application to specific people groups will be given the opportunity to meet in subsequent sessions in order to apply the principles taught in this course.

Note: This is not a drama workshop, but do come dressed comfortably and prepared to move