Year 8 students rehearsing for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

From the Head of Drama

The Senior School’s Drama programs are full steam ahead this semester. While the VCE class is busy preparing and consolidating their learnings in these final few weeks, Years 7 to 10 are exploring theatrical styles, analysing scripts and devising new works.

Year 7 students are delving into Greek theatre. To do so, they are creating masks and devising a mini musical based on a chosen Greek myth. They have approached this task with much enthusiasm and are enjoying learning about the origins of theatre and the conventions that were created many hundreds of years ago that we still see and use in theatres today, including chorus, orchestra, tragedy, and comedy just to name a few.

Our Year 8 students are exploring Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although written some 400 years ago, the students have been able to relate to some aspects of the story. The language has proven to be a challenge, but once ‘decoded’, the girls have identified that the themes translate through time and their connection with Shakespeare begins.

Year 8 students rehearsing for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Years 9 and 10 elective, ‘Page to Stage’, is focused on text analysis using monologues, which they will perform in the coming weeks. They have selected from a range of contemporary and classic pieces, which explore different theatrical styles including realism and absurdism.

Last week I accompanied the VCE Theatre Studies class to see a contemporary Australian musical, Motor Mouth Loves Suck Face. An apocalyptic musical, it explores themes of hope, escape, heartbreak, life, death and of course zombies. This fast paced, edgy and hilarious musical was enjoyed by us all. The students were fortunate to be given a Q&A session after the performance where they asked the actors and director questions specific to their upcoming SAC and final written exam.