Berkeley Academy / Primary School - Summer Camp 2014

At the start of June 2014, the team met together to plan how the
summer school would work. Our aim this year was to make a more
holistic and polished performance and to do this we would become
a Theatre Company. Creating the ‘Berkeley Adventure Time Theatre
Company’, named by the children, gave them an identity and a sense
of team with a unified goal.
The idea of secret agents travelling through time gave us the
opportunity to really push the boundaries and challenge ourselves
as arts practitioners. Four time zones were chosen; “The Future”,
“The 1980’s”, “World War 1” and “The Jurassic Era”.
We learnt a lot from our experience in 2013, in particular, the
way to get the best from the children. With this in mind, we gave
them greater control of the process and content and trusted in their
wonderful imaginations to make the story come to life. We reduced
the number of days they worked in each arts discipline to increase the
time bringing the performance together in the last week. Changing
the rotation timings put pressure on the children to work faster and
smarter, but it also proved the more we challenged them, the more
they achieved. They didn’t disappoint us and as one child said, “Well
Miss, we are outstanding”.
The children worked in four groups and in keeping with the theme,
we named the groups after the planets: Mars, Jupiter, Venus and
Saturn. The children loved the idea.
On day one and two, all the children worked in each arts discipline
for half a day and began the devising process. In art they made their
own secret agent file and created a character profile and name. In
drama they began to build a team ethos as they considered what they
would miss most in the future if they didn’t have it. In dance they
considered the same question but through physical interpretation
and in music they worked with keyboards creating soundscapes and
character themes. By the end of day two, we had the skeleton of a
storyline and some key characters emerged.
“Here I am in the fut
nothing to be recogni
The sun is letting dow
getting darker in the
Planes have been cru
make flying c
No human
on the foo
Different t
so differen
Literacy and numeracy were once again a key factor of the work
produced and this year we incorporated these skills and learning
opportunities within the body of the project and through their
designated roles as a theatre company. They designed, measured,
calculated quantities and chose material to make the huge human
and dinosaur puppets. They improvised ideas and situations which
stimulated creative writing, storyboards and character studies,
leading to an amazing storyline and script. They wrote poetry and
experimented with dance techniques, incorporating modern and
classical moves into their routines with mime. They wrote song
lyrics in different music genres with difficult rhythms and rehearsed
as an ensemble. They made wonderful junk percussion to create
atmospheric music for different time zones and link sounds to