school offerings!

Each of the three sample programs listed below can be tailored to the needs of your school in terms of content, scheduling, access, and cultural responsiveness. All programs are built with Universal Design for Learning to maximize access in any classroom.

In the Spring of 2023, BKBXEd is teaching in 15 schools across all five boroughs, preK to high school, half through direct partnership with the Arts Office at the Department of Education.

You can learn more about the basics of our pedagogy HERE.

Please email us at brokenboxeducation@gmail.com to start a conversation or ask for references!

arts assembly + Workshop

  • BKBX visits your school for a one day arts enrichment program. We start by showing a mime show tailored for the age range of your students, from preK to 12th grade. Then, a cohort of students dives into a mime workshop to put the conepts they’ve seen onstage into their own experience!

  • Through our all-ages performance wing, BKBXKids!, Broken Box develops and performs shows for kids that tour schools, performing arts centers, and community spaces. The shows are interactive, teach students some basics on mime, and deliver our BKBXEd mission through high quality theater. When visiting a school, we are able to prepare students and teachers with classroom materials for enhanced engagement, including videos from our repertoire and/or BKBXKids! YouTube channel. Specific content can be tailored to the needs of each school; we curate the setlist from our 100+ piece repertoire.

  • 9 - 9:30 lower school assembly

    9:45 - 10:15 upper school assembly

    10:30 - 12 5th grade workshop

physical storytelling residency

  • A residency with BKBXEd teaching artists takes place over the course of 4-10 weeks, with the typical length of 8 weeks. Students have the opportunity to work with artists on a weekly basis, skill-building and integrating embodied storytelling into their learning, either in their gen ed classroom or a theater class.

  • BKBXEd’s flagship curriculum is called Physical Storytelling, which covers the basics of mime technique and offers students tools to explore their own body languages and physical theater voice. The BKBXEd team likes to work with teachers to highlight different elements of our curriculum around their interests, e.g. collaborative process, nonverbal teaching strategies, or staging for physical theater.

  • Weekly on Wednesdays

    10 - 10:45 Class 1

    10:55 - 11:40 Class 2

    11:45 - 12:30 Class 3

Big feelings

  • Our embodied social emotional learning curriculum, Big Feelings, can be delivered either through a one-time “Foundations” program for an entire student body over the course of a week, in a multi-part residency with 2-3 classes per day, or via a teacher training to offer tools to the faculty and staff of your school.

  • What is the body’s experience of heightened emotion, and how can mime help us explore it? Big Feelings provides practical tools for emotional processing tailored for children in grades 1-5, as well as expansive study of the body as a tool in theatrical storytelling.

    Live instruction focuses on nonverbal games, culture-crafting, and learning about how the body communicates on- and off-stage. The curriculum uses a library of “story episodes.” In each episode, a BKBX artist performs a mimed mini-play in which their character encounters an event that elicits a big feeling, e.g. a passive-aggressive comment, a microaggression, or a cancelled event. Each lesson focuses on this single narrative, the big emotions it elicits, and the multiple ways those emotions may manifest in the body.

  • Teacher training: 75 minutes

    Weekly classes: 2 classes back-to-back for two months

Why Mime? 

Mime distills theater by stripping away our typical indicators (word, props, costumes, sets) and using the nonverbal languages of the body to tell the story. However, there exists a second half to that palette: the audience’s imagination. By creating invisible objects, environments, and dialogue, we invite the audience to fill in the blanks with their own imagination, connotation, or memory. Creating a story through mime, therefore, requires a deep connection with the audience and a sophisticated understanding of how to illustrate the human condition; it requires empathy. Our approach is to teach the performer, writer, director, and audience member in each of us--we work to activate the holistic communicator.

About Broken Box

Broken Box Mime Theater is a non-profit theater company that creates contemporary, original theater through mime. Our mission is three-fold: to activate the imaginations of our audiences, contemporize the art of mime, and remind us all of the power of simple storytelling. Since 2011 we have paired our mainstage and children’s performances with BKBXEd programming; bringing our art into the classroom has become a central way of achieving our mission. 

BKBXEd, a division of Broken Box Mime Theater, provides experiences that connect thought, body, and feeling to increase communication, confidence, and positive relationships. Our work centers movement-based storytelling, joy, accessibility, reflection, resilience, and the practice of empathy!  

Mime offers us a unique lens through which to consider how we behave, create, and communicate.