Shakespeare Club 2018 - The beginning!
Welcome to the first blog (of hopefully many) from DJPA's "Shakespeare Club".
It is an honour to be taking on the challenge of carrying on and co-leading with Miss Bole the 3 year legacy of being part of the RSC Learning and Performance Network (LPN) and Associate Schools program. A role that was previously managed by our amazing friend Miss Melody Montana. Read more about the work we have previously done here: (https://www.damejanet-tkat.org/shakespeare-school)
The overall goal in running the club is to work towards performing an "ensemble" show of Macbeth in June, working with our associate schools to create a brilliant and unique show (in a very special location!)
Starting this week (Mon 22nd Jan 2018) Miss Bole and myself (Mr Woo) had offered to run a "Shakespeare Club" on a Thursday after school to a maximum of 20 Year 3's to 6's.
We were overwhelmed with the positive response and succumbed to increase the size of the group to 30!
(Many apologies if you haven't managed to secure a place)
I decided to create this blog in the aftermath of our first session last night which I thought was an incredible success and left Miss Bole and I (and hopefully many of our club members) extremely excited, enthusiastic and looking forward to doing more!
We started off with a few games in order to get to know each other and feel at ease in each other's company. We played a few simple name games to put names to faces and played some rhythm "clap" games to warm up our brains after a long day at school.
Next was my personal favourite, the "Buzzy-Bee" game; In a circle we wait (buzzing as bees obviously) for the leader to give a letter of the alphabet, then within 5 seconds, we have to act out an object beginning with that letter... It's not as easy as it sounds, for the letter "C" the only thing I could think of was "Cabbage"! Luckily the kids were a million times more imaginative than I was!
Being suitably warmed up, it was time to explain why we were here and our purpose for assembling the club. We introduced the story of Macbeth with the opening scene: "Macbeth and his comrade, Banquo, return from battle across a deserted heath when they come across three strange creatures - the 'Weird Sisters'. They tell Macbeth that he will become Thane of Cawdor, then King of Scotland and tell Banquo his descendants will also become kings. "
Using this information, our club divided themselves into small groups to create quick freeze-frames of certain subjects. "The Battle", "The Victory Party", "Meeting the Witches" and "Crowing a King". The results were absolutely genius...
To sum it all up... I personally had a great time working with these budding actors last night and can't wait to learn some more with them! See you next Thursday!
Mr Woodward
