Our Year 10 GCSE Drama class recently travelled to The Perse School, Cambridge to participate in a workshop with Shakespeare Schools Festival. Our student Tabitha takes up the story:
“Upon arrival, we were welcomed by the Shakespeare Schools Festival staff and were quickly introduced to the other class we were working with (a class of Year 8 from St Johns, Cambridge). To begin with, we conducted a range of warmup exercises, including vocal and physical techniques, for which we were mixed with the students of St Johns. These were very useful as they prepared us for the day, our performance and were a good icebreaker for us all.
We then learned about the five major rules of performing live theatre: to project, to open our body language, to always stay in character, to come downstage and to indulge the ‘Kiss or Kill’. We performed the first scene of our given play, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and received useful feedback from the other school, regarding our characterisation, interaction and how well we utilize the stage. Afterwards, we split into our schools and worked on our scenes with one of the Shakespeare Schools Festival staff. We developed our characters in our first three scenes and improved our reactions to the dialogue when we are not speaking. We were introduced to many useful and effective rehearsal techniques, which we will be using in our rehearsals for this and future performances.
Overall, I feel that the Shakespeare Schools Festival workshop was both an enjoyable and invaluable experience. It improved and developed our current scenes and provided us with the skills to input these into future roles.
The group are looking forward to going back to The Perse School on November 14th and they will be working hard in the interim. Their finished interpretation of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is to be performed in front of other schools in the project and the members of Shakespeare Schools Festival.”
Press release from Witchford Village College
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