A Theme for Your Performance; Why and how?

You may think “Why should I bother to choose a theme for my performance”, and we have come up with 3 main reasons why.

First, what is a theme or topic? A theme or topic for a performance is one idea or event that the whole performance is based around. Examples of this are the Christmas or Easter story and peace or love.

The first reason to choose a theme is to make it easier for you. As the creator, it is easier to either find or create material for one topic rather than 3 or 4. It is also easier to explain the same theme from many different angles than to do more than one topic at the same time.

The next reason is so that the audience can follow and understand. When you keep the topic the same throughout the performance it makes it easy for them to follow. A lot of research has shown that, especially in young kids, they need to hear things 3 to 4 times before they can understand, so when ministering to them you can help them learn more if you say things multiple times.

The third main reason is that if the ministry or group is going through a series or has different themes for every week that they want you to keep to, then you must. This is one thing that you will have to cooperate with.

Now that you know why we think that you will want a theme or topic you might wonder “How do I choose a theme?” That is exactly what we are going to try to tell you. (These are just tips and things we have found helpful when choosing a theme. They are a good place to start when choosing your own theme but you may find even better ways of attacking this yourself.)

The first thing you need to think about is does your ministry or group have a theme for that day or a series that they are going through. If this is the case then it makes your decision on a theme very easy.

We did quite a few performances with the AWANA program at our church and they always had a different theme for every week so if we were performing on a certain day we needed to make our theme the same as the theme for that day.

Some groups may go through the books of the Bible or parables. If this is the case, talk to the director to see if they want you to continue the series or choose your own theme.

When we started clowning we were always given the theme we were supposed to perform, but once we broke off from our church which ran the AWANA program that we had worked with, we needed to come up with our own themes and these are the things we have found helpful to come up with our own themes.

The first thing that we found helpful was thinking of themes that go with certain holidays or seasons. Seasons and holidays don’t change when they are so they are good for a starting point. We have done The Christmas story, love (Valentine's day), patience (summer/ waiting for summer), and thankfulness (Thanksgiving.)

If you have chosen a date and it does not line up with a season or you have done all of the seasonal performance already, (or another reason/you need more ideas) you can choose a series. Some series ideas would be a book of the Bible, the fruits of the spirit which we are currently, working on (with some breaks built in), or parables. You can also come up with your own series and then you may have ideas for your next few performances.

The last tip, which is not an idea for making a theme but could help in the future when you are stuck, is to make a bucket list. You may think a bucket list for themes does not make sense. Well if you give it some thought we believe that it does. If you make a list of all the performance themes that you want to do and ideas for them you then have a head start when you need to choose a topic for your next performance.

We hope this was helpful on why you would choose themes, and how to pick one.

Something Silly Clowns

(Cupcake and Dizzy)

Two clowns trying to spread God's love to everyone.

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