Drama Scholars Workshop: Performing with Scripts

On Thursday 3^rd April our Drama scholars were treated to a dedicated Drama workshop in the Austin Lecture theatre with our visiting LAMDA teacher, Jak Ford-Lane. Jak spent the afternoon focussing on a key area for all actors, ‘Performing with Scripts’, and challenged the scholars to perform a Shakespearean and a modern monologue, noting the differences in their experience.

The workshop offered the chance to engage with technical analysis of classical and contemporary text; the manipulation of the text for the benefit of the audience; identifying the subtext in scripts and working out ways to communicate that subtext to create a richer performance; dealing with dialogue that is initially hard to understand; and solo work that actors use for auditions and rehearsals. Following an introduction and some direction from Jak the students got stuck into their delivery and received constructive feedback on their efforts from the audience.

Jessica Wittert van Hoogland, Director of Drama, reflected, “This is a wonderful opportunity for our scholars to become immersed in practical drama as they learn valuable performance skills. It is also a brilliant chance for everyone to enhance their creativity whilst consolidating their bond as a group.”

India (Year 10) was enjoying the experience, enthusing, “It’s very exciting, I’m very excited. It’s a new opportunity for us and I think that we’re all really taking it on board and it’s really helping us progress in our learning. Jak teaches me for LAMDA separately but only one other scholar does that. It’s quite exciting to get to work with other people who share the same interests because then we get to see different perspectives on it.”

Isi (Year 9) added, ““It’s really nice to get to know the other scholars because with the older ones, because they don’t have time, they don’t to come to some of the other scholar events. It’s really nice to have a little community within the drama community of the school where we can bounce off with one another a bit more than we can with all the drama students around because there are so many of them. I’m really enjoying it.”