NOTES FOR TEACHERS

If you'd like to perform "The Night the Fairies Danced on Dwarf Mountain" at your school, all I'm asking now is that you notify me of your intention, give me credit if you print out the script, mention where you got it if you do a performance for grown-ups, and let me know how it goes. I'd love to see pictures.

"The Night the Fairies Danced on Dwarf Mountain" had its birth in a preschool sandbox. I was building a sand mountain with some of the children. Any time the mountain reached a certain height, another group of children would swoop down and start jumping up and down on it in what looked like a kind of dance. When they finished, no mountain was left. I could feel archetypes embedded in this scenario. When it was my turn to do Circle in our room, I wrote the play.

Our class did the play for two weeks in October, 2004. The last day we did a performance for about twenty parents. Our whole experience was a rousing success.

Part of our success was due to our costumes. Children really enjoy dressing up for a part. One of our room's teachers created lovely, golden crowns for the fairies to wear. Another teacher searched our school's considerable supply of props and costumes, finding wonderful wings and robes for the fairies, t-shirts and ski hats, and picks/shovels for the dwarves, and suitable props and robes for the Sun, Moon, and King of the Dwarves.

For the Mountain we used pillows covered with a blanket (and our imaginations).
I made up simple melodies for the songs, and you may, too.

Some of the speeches toward the end of the play proved too difficult for our preschoolers. They'll have to be shortened, divvied up, or cut, unless you're doing the play with kindergartners or older boys and girls. Preschoolers are best with one-line, or at most two-line speeches.

I hope you'll have as much fun with the play as we did!

                                                                  Sincerely,

                                                                  Max Reif ("Mr. Max")
                                                                  Walnut Creek, CA

back to the text