A week of drama
A week of drama
Monday, 23 February 2009
This has been a much busier week than I had expected. No week is predictable when you are Head of a school, but this week has been even less predictable than most, which is really saying something. My wife, Di, was admitted to hospital, some negotiations between the staff and the board on a new policy for the allocation of staff flats took an unexpected turn, I covered some extra classes for an absent colleague, the process of Hong Kong student applications continued at full speed (if you can call answering tens of e-mails and letters from disappointed students and their parents ‘full speed’), some extra negotiations were needed with several overseas selection committees, I had to prepare some papers for next week’s UWC Global National Committees meeting in Swaziland, the first round of budget re-negotiations began, and after I had taught my normal classes and kept up with e-mails (well, almost!), my week seemed to have largely disappeared.
Fortunately, for my sanity, this week was also the time when our Theatre Arts students were presenting their major performances and individual presentations. Attending these performances is always a huge joy for me, but I especially appreciated the opportunities for some short breaks that they presented to me this week. Fortunately, given everything else that was going on, the performances were well up to their usual standard; our Theatre Arts teacher, Steve Reynolds, has a rare capacity to elicit outstanding performances from our students.
Late last week, I attended the Year 2 students’ major performance of ‘The Visit’ by Friedrich Dürrenmatt at the Fringe Theatre in Central. This was an epic performance - almost 3 hours long - in which the actors each played several characters without ever leaving the stage. The play was thoroughly enjoyable in its own right as well as being a fitting tribute to two years of outstanding study in Theatre Arts by our students.
Several individual performances have also been held in the Drama Room on our own campus over the past few weeks, including Anastasiya and Junko’s presentation of ‘Jenny Does Shakespeare’ (by GL Horton), Lynn, Mariana, Ramy and Sara’s performance of 'Until We Meet Again' (written by Lynn, one of our students), and Friday night’s sensational performance of ‘Memoirs of a Reading’, a very moving drama on the impact of divorce on children written and directed by Oda, and performed by Robert, Tine, Melek and Vivian. I attended them all and loved each.
On a much lighter note, I also loved the outdoor performance on Wednesday afternoon of ‘Commedia dell’Arte’ - a medieval masked comedy on the theme of substance abuse. I wish the photos I have placed here could convey the fun, the wit and the slapstick humour that we all enjoyed - hopefully you can sense sense the colour and the fun nonetheless.
As always in my blogs, click on any image to enlarge.