Last weekend, our Y12 DP Theatre students attended the International Schools Theatre Association’s (ISTA) event, especially designed for DP Theatre students, called Theatre Arts Programme Symposium (TaPs) along with their teachers, Danielle Veilleux and Paul McCracken. You can find out more about ISTA and their events here: https://ista.co.uk/what-we-do/taps/
We are exceptionally proud that all of our five DP Theatre students secured a 50% scholarship to this event. The event was hosted at KGV and approximately sixty students gathered from eight schools all over Hong Kong.
Our DC students were allocated three different ensembles, in order to network with other theatre students and work with their fabulous leaders; Tim Howe, Moira Arthurs, and Kieran Burgess. These wonderful ensemble leaders are all experienced professional performers, IB teachers and examiners, and are the very best sources of information regarding the IB DP theatre course, as well as being engaging and fun practitioners.
Our students spent all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning exploring elements of the DP theatre course, through practitioner work, collaborative theatre, devising and experimenting with text and visual stimuli. As a teacher, it was a dream to circulate and hear my students easily discussing and trying out techniques by Brecht, Grotowski, Brook, Artaud, and so many more. Students were treated to Master classes and performances across the three day workshop too.
What’s next?
The DC Drama department strives to make this an annual event for DP theatre students in Y12. DC is already committed to host the 2019 ISTA TaPs at our very own school so that we can continue to provide experiences and opportunities to our students. Additionally we plan to initiate an annual trip to attend an ISTA middle school festival in Asia with students from Y7-10 each year.
To read more about this event, and to keep up to date with our dramatic events at DC, please keep returning to our social media pages:
DC Secondary Theatre blog: http://blogs.discovery.edu.hk/drama/
DC Secondary Theatre Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/discoverycollegetheatre/
