Bio
Dan Burkey designs joyful experiences to bridge academic and arts learning between the classroom, theatre, video space, circus ring, and game table. His classroom experience includes 8 years teaching with The Étude Group, a K-12 charter built on the principles of arts integration and visible thinking. In 2012, he founded Mad Yarn Theatre company to bring offbeat, community-driven theatre to his then-home in Sheboygan, WI. As a circus artist, he collaborated with Warped Dance Company to retell the story of The Nutcracker through narrated aerial dance in Clara Takes Flight (as part of the process, he also invented the art of aerial unicycling). A resident of Northern Kentucky, he collaborates with American Legacy Theatre and My Nose Turns Red Youth Circus. He holds a BA in Dramatic Arts from Centre College, and a teaching certificate in Theatre Education from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Potential Residency Project
Finding the Arts In Your Academic Discipline
“How might we explore academic Essential Questions through the arts?"
I specialize in Arts Integration- finding and expressing the connections between academic disciplines and the art forms of theatre, film, and creative writing. Even though I work across a variety of art forms, my core process remixes similar components. Components can be combined in different ways based on students' needs and teachers' desired content connections. A longer residency might combine several components and build up to a larger product; a shorter residency might target just one component to build skills for other classroom learning.
Through the residency process, I hope to empower teachers and students to incorporate meaningful artistic expression in their work even after our moment of collaboration ends.
Build Thinking Connections Through Brainstorming
Thinking connections are the fuel for the creativity rocket. These components build a bank of shared ideas that relate to academic content.
- Using visible thinking strategies to draw inspiration from historical portraits or other images
- Identifying relationships between people, places, things, events, and ideas
- Identifying changes in technology, design, or philosophy over time
- Examining scientific phenomena: How they work and how people experience them
- Interpreting fiction or non-fiction stories through adaptations or alternative versions
- Applying understanding of genres to generate story ideas
Define Perspectives Through Character Creation
Drama needs characters to make things happen. Characters give audiences and actors a vehicle to experience the story. Character ideas can come from lots of places:
- Historical people and events
- Animals and/or plants in an ecosystem
- Personifications of forces, change dynamics, or elements of a scientific process
- People who need to solve a problem using skills from the content area (e.g. Conflict resolution strategies, understanding of scientific processes, analytical skills, etc.)
- Characters from mythology or fiction
- Original superheroes, villains, or creatures
- Inhabitants of a collaboratively created city or planet
- People with different jobs in a real or fictional business, organization, government, or community
Explore Relationships Through Conflict
Storytelling requires students to understand the role of conflict in creating action. While real life asks us to resolve conflicts as efficiently as possible, stories allow us to play around with them and explore them from multiple angles. To inspire story conflicts, we might:
- Identify characters' goals and analyze which of those goals might not be achievable at the same time
- Identify ways that characters' goals might conflict with their environment or society
- Identify relationships between characters and brainstorm interpersonal conflicts that might emerge from those relationships and characters' differing goals
- Experiment with possibilities- What would be the worst thing that could happen to the character? What might cause it to happen?
- Explore internal conflicts. How might a character's own goals, fears, anxieties, dreams, and doubts create a struggle in the character's own decisions?
Organize Ideas Through Story Structure
Using an existing framework helps students create cohesive stories and helps reduce the anxiety of the blank page. It also builds connections with Language Arts-specific content related to story structure. There are several approaches we might use:
- Use a story spine or cause/problem/solution structure to plan scenes that tell the story
- Apply other formal structures such as Aristotelian Tragedy, The Hero's Journey, or fables and myths from various cultures
Develop Creative Technique Through Playful Practice
Scenes can be created and captured in different ways to meet a variety of skill levels, abilities, and needs. Each skill can be scaffolded individually, and offers various options for capturing the final product
- Dialogue and/or Lyric writing
- Could be handwritten, typed, drawn as comics, or audio-recorded
- Improvisation
- For scene devising, this can be captured with video and/or audio
- Tableaus and stage imagery
- Could be captured with photos or sketches to create a visual script
- Voice acting and presentation technique
- Character and Scene Analysis
- Physical movement and expression
- Storyboarding and cinematic language
- Drawn and/or written scene descriptions
- Cinematography and Video Editing
- Stop-motion animation
Share Creative Processes Through Final Products
I try to emphasize the process over the product, but working together toward a shared goal gives students motivation and a sense of pride and accomplishment. A final product also lets students share their work with families and the community.
We can adapt the presentation of our work to a wide variety of formats:
- Dramatic script
- Staged play
- Song lyrics
- Performance of tableaus and physical movement expressions
- Filmed and edited scenes
- Performance in front of a green screen with student-created backdrops
- Stop-motion animation
- …and anything else our imaginations can come up with!