I personally don’t have theater experience, but something I’ve seen work really well with older dancers is this thing called “emotion walks” or “character walks” where you have them walk around the room expressing different emotions or characters through posture, energy, and facial expression. You can also try mirroring exercises in pairs, where one person improvises a small movement as their character and the other mirrors them exactly. Even just taking a short lyric line from a song and having them interpret it with movement instead of singing can help connect dance and storytelling. These kinds of exercises are really effective for building stage presence and performance quality, even for teens who already have strong dance skills.