CREATIVITY | IDEAS

How to Dramadoodle

Activate your subconscious, unlock your creativity & excavate your work through play

Dramadoodle by author

I have spent twenty years in the classroom experimenting, discovering, and figuring out new ways to do things. Once, I held a Shakespeare experience where students serenaded audience-members with heightened text while blindfolded in an intimate setting. Once, we did an installation of statues: the students froze, forming a complex image in a public location, and then dispersed without comment. We’ve created sound and movement pieces based off of poems, songs from images, and characters from stranger interviews.

One such experiment was the Dramadoodle, and it has recently been extremely helpful to me in my own creative process. It is a playful exercise that combines image and text, art and impulse. It taps into a mindful state in order to invite focus, clarity and truth. In my piece If You Think Outside the Box, Why Would You Work Inside One?, I detail how this brainstorming process has helped me dive into my own work in a new way.

So what is a dramadoodle? It’s a combination of dramaturgy and doodling. You remember doodling? It’s what you used to do in Politics & US History in high school until you realized at age 40 you can’t comprehend exactly how the government…