Lana’s Blog

I have had such fun with my Theatre Class recently. We have created a process for our performance. Who knows how long or short it will be? The group agreed that we should include a ladder on which to hang relevant words, an oversized top hat from which to extract words and a large book from which we will include names of members of the audience . When instructed,the audience members who are named will collect a word from the hat and then give the word to a puppet who will stick the word onto a specified point on the ladder. Slowly the words will form a sentence.

As the words are drawn out of the oversized hat, the relevant piece is performed.  We do not know the oder of the performance as it will be determined by the word from the hat. The class has worked out which word connects with each piece we have improvised. Our task now is to turn ten improvised pieces into rehearsed works of worth.

The students worked on their set pieces today and will complete them tomorrow, which leaves us 2 double lessons to rehearse and finalise our performance work.  Then we’ll blog. I am always interested in how students will problem solve when creating oversized set pieces. They are always happiest when painting, phoning spotlight to research where we can purchase dye, creating props, and causing general havoc.

I am extremely comfortable with the variety of pieces which have been chosen and the way in which the group is performing.

The history of this group is that at the end of 2005 three local schools amalgamated to produce 2 schools. One is a Senior Secondary College for students from Years 10 - 12 and the other is a Middle Years School for Years 7-9 on two campuses. This meant that the kids in my Theatre class have not grown up together at school but are from 3 different schools.  Walking into my Year 11 Theatre class this is not evident. I am very happy with the way the group includes each member of the class and respects eachothers differences.  There is a healthy sense of belonging and wellbeing.  I hope this continues as we add students next semester.  Five lessons left…….

Lana

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 12:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.