It was a busy week for the Secondary Performing Arts, with Year 11 Theatre and Year 9 Theatre collaborative performances, and Year 9 Music solo performances.
Year 9 Music
For the large Year 9 Music cohort, four classroom concerts were held during the week to guide the 27 students through their solo performances. For some, this was the first time they had performed solo for a live audience.
Classmates were very supportive and displayed not only the IB Learner Profile attribute of being courageous (being a risk-taker) through performing, but also the attribute of being caring. This was especially evident through the empathy shown as students changed roles from performer to audience member.
The four concerts featured a variety of instruments, including voice, piano, violin, viola, cello, gǔzhēng, accordion, guitar and drum kit, in programmes ranging across 300 years of music history and styles, from J.S. Bach to Elgar, mxrningstar to Day6, and ABBA to Taylor Swift. Through their choice of music, the performers also took us on a global journey from Europe to America to Asia.
As part of their Concert Time unit, students provided their audience with programme notes, the result of their own research, and will now complete their Arts process journal, summarizing their decisions and preparation for performance, and watch their concert videos to enable them to complete their evaluation and reflection.
Year 9 Theatre
In preparation for their IB Year 10 ePortfolio next year, Year 9 Theatre students chose a previous ePortfolio unit of ‘Storytelling’ to explore the structure and concepts behind the official assessment.
Using ‘Contemporizing the Tale’, a Juilliard Creative Classroom Activity, and through the prompt of storytelling, the group prepared and presented a shadow puppetry performance. The students rehearsed, learned, and performed a shadow puppetry play based on a chosen culture’s folktale. Puppets were made by the students, along with designing a set and preparing the script.
Year 11 Theatre
This week also so the culmination of the DP Theatre (Year 11) Collaborative Project, with a performance of the student created play, ‘The Pride of Sin: A Coffee Argument’.
As outlined in their course requirements, the three actors worked together to create and perform an original piece of theatre from a starting point of their choice. Their resulting seven-minute piece was then followed by an audience ‘Question and Answer’ session.
Students chose ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ as their initial stimuli. From that each student created individual devised theatre pieces, drawing on their experiences with the Paper Birds theatre company workshop. Using elements of Verbatim Theatre, exploring movement and motif, character and narrative, and performance skills, students selected one play to perform for their invited audience.
Now Year 11 students will complete their individual project reports to accompany the group performance recording.
Miss Jennifer Lazareck
Secondary Performing Arts: DP & MYP Theatre
Mr Malcolm Mawhinney
Head of Performing Arts (K-12)
Secondary Performing Arts: DP & MYP Music / MYP Theatre
