60-Minute Workshops for Stage 2
The following workshops are linked to the 2024 Creative Arts Syllabus. For workshops linked to the 2006 Syllabus, click here.
Shapeshifters
What are the attributes of a great actor?
In fast-paced, ensemble-focused activities, students explore the expressive potential of their bodies and voices to enact real and imagined worlds. We discuss how changes in movement and vocal quality alter meaning for our audience. Students experience characterisation from an actor's perspective, trialling a range of different characters and exploring character relationships with their classmates. We provide students and teachers with the vocabulary to talk about acting in the classroom.
What Happens Next?
Tension is the energy that drives drama. It makes the audience need to know 'What Happens Next?'
In this workshop, we transform the classroom into a suspense laboratory. We use the world of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are to explore how stories challenge our expectations to create tension. Students work in groups to devise and present original scenes, physically embodying the mystery and surprise of Maurice's Sendak's text.
Masks Of The Maya
Students step into role as expert archaeologists investigating the vibrant, dramatic traditions of the Ancient Maya.
In this workshop, students examine evidence from temple paintings and manuscripts to reconstruct the lost theatre of the Ancient Maya. Moving from inquiry to action, students decode the symbolism of Mayan masks and embody the sacred animals of Mesoamerica to devise their own movement sequences. We discuss the past in order to ‘play out’ history. Students explore how space and role express cultural stories, bringing the ancient world to life based on the evidence they uncover.
On The Spot
Improvisation is the ultimate dramatic tool to explore and expand our ideas.
On The Spot encourages students to dive headfirst into the key principles of improvisation: making offers and accepting each other's ideas. Guided by experienced improvisers, students participate in fast-paced activities that challenge them to embody a range of roles and dramatic situations. Moving from games to performance, students use improvisation as a devising tool - generating scenes collaboratively that stretch their imagination and lead to new discoveries in character and narrative.
Junior Directors
Students use dramatic and production elements to represent vivid settings and situations on stage.
Alternating between the roles of actor and director, students explore the use of music, props and costumes to build dramatic meaning. We examine the dynamic illustrations in Shackleton's Journey by William Grill to understand how narrative is conveyed through images. Diving into the theme of 'Great Adventures', students work in groups to create adventure narratives inspired by real and imagined events. They combine production elements with space, role, and tension to stage their adventure in tableaux for the class.