ISTA/Scene March 07

“A fantastic experience steeped in ISTA values which left me feeling both exhausted and
inspired. We tried, we learnt, we discussed, we disagreed, we laughed and we made new
friends. Every primary teacher should be able to have this experience. For childrenís sakes we
need more of this approach in our classrooms.”
Zoë Weiner, St. Julian’s School, Portugal
of beggars and whores. Students
choreographed the main numbers.
Being in Bangkok we re-set it in our
local red light district, turning the theatre
into a cabaret bar with the audience sat
round tables, waiters and computer
monitors on each table which provided
captions, snatches of song lyrics and a
pictorial montage to enhance the
modern relevance of the song lyrics.
We also caused huge outrage and were
nearly shut down after the first night,
but I’d do it again any day!
(A HARD DAY’S) TWELFTH NIGHT
High school students with mixed cast
as large as you like. The Shakespeare
classic set in the 1960’s. An idea
taken from a music teacher in Beijing,
this was hugely successful as students
helped to play a part in updating the
setting, which gave them great
ownership as well as a refreshed
understanding of the dialogue. Duke
Orsino, in flowing ‘60’s hippy gear
enters strumming a guitar and singing
‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’; Sir
Toby Belch sings ‘I am the Walrus’ in
the kitchen and a chorus surrounds
poor captive Mad Malvolio accusing
him of being a ‘Nowhere Man’. It was
fun to work with the cast choosing
Beatles songs that fitted the text and
helped support it. Groups of students
choreographed the whole show that
took place in the round in a Girl Guide
shed decorated with saris and incense.
The music was simple to arrange for a
basic five-piece band and a small
string group, based on one of those
Beatles Complete songbooks for
piano. It was a great crowd pleaser
and a fabulous way to expose an
international cast and audience to
Shakespeare in a non-threatening way.
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
Lower Secondary students and a large
mixed cast. This was quite a dated
text that we chopped up and turned
into a wonderfully warm show. We cut
the songs and work-shopped a
number of new ones that we made up,
based on fragments and folk songs
from many of the countries visited in
the play. It was easy to direct as it
fitted neatly into five sections which we
cast independently and then fitted
26 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
Shahariar and Scheherazade into the
transition sections. We were able to
explore many theatrical styles from
Beijing Opera to belly dancing,
fabulous costumes in rich colours, a lot
of dance and physical theatre with all
the students having a great deal of
input into their sections. We spent a
good deal of time focusing on the rich
cultural traditions of the Arab world,
which created some very valuable
discussions. We also had a Muslim
Dad come in and act as our sensitivity
gauge, as we added prayers and a
variety of Muslim cultural traditions and
phrases. We decorated the hall with
huge swathes of fabric like a Bedouin
tent; the local carpet merchant lent us
some (very valuable!) carpets for the
floor and local Indian and Turkish
restaurants sold food outside.
Kristen Van Ginhoven –
International School of Brussels,
Belgium
ALICE IN WONDERLAND AND
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
by Adrian Mitchell, rights from The
Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd,
Drury House, 34/43 Russell Street,
London WC2B 5HA
This was a middle school production
done in the style of Physical Theatre. It
is a terrific ensemble play that affords
tons of opportunity for use of
imagination. We had over 50 MS
students in the show, with 5 different
Alice’s. There was a ‘physical theatre
chorus’ that took over all the
responsibility for creating the different
environments. They became the water
by using fabric, they became the train
tracks or the forest or the flowers by
using their bodies and working as an
ensemble. They also used their
imaginations to create the different ways
that Alice grows and shrinks. We had a
‘storytelling chorus’ that took over the
responsibilities of narrating the story.
Many of the poems in the play were
delivered by this chorus using choral
reading techniques. We also had a
‘sound master’ who was in charge of
creating the sounds that accompanied
the show. There was a continual
soundscape and he and his assistant
had a sound booth on the stage filled
with all kinds of soundmakers. Then,
there were the actors who mostly took
on double roles throughout the play, as
there are so many parts to cast. They
were all dressed in neutral black
costumes and added extra bits to show
the audience who they were in that
scene. We had a physical theatre
specialist, Rebecca Patterson, come in
to give a workshop on a Saturday for
the kids early on in rehearsal, which
made a huge difference. The idea of
putting on this version of the play can
be daunting, as it is so complex and
there are so many environments and
characters, but, once we latched onto
physical theatre, minimalism (we started
with a blank stage with one platform the
length of the stage upstage) and sound
as our main vehicles to tell the story, it
became an excellent experiment in
using imagination and the MS students
who participated in it all said afterwards
that they never would have expected it
to turn out so well. They truly felt the
power of working as an ensemble.
SHAKESPEARE’S WOMEN by
Libby Appel and Michael
Flachmann, rights from Southern
Illinois University Press,
fax: + 618-453-1221
This play became a collaborative
project between the HS performance,
technical theatre, choir, strings and
visual arts classes. Plus, it also had
students in it who auditioned as part of
an after school program. It grew out of
a desire for the Performing Arts
department to collaborate on a project
that would afford all the students
diverse challenges in their specific
area. So, the play is basically a battle
of the sexes featuring Shakespeare’s
greatest scenes. We decided to use
each act to visit a timeline in history as
part of our concept. Therefore, act
one, where the male narrator is trying
to persuade the audience that women
are frail, using various scenes from
Shakespeare to illustrate his point,
moved from medieval to renaissance
to classical to baroque to romantic to
cold war. Act two then followed the
same timeline, although it was
presented from the female narrator’s
point of view, where she was proving
that women had infinite variety. The