Lets get Creative

Eleven students attended the BSME Drama Festival at Sherborne School, Qatar on March 12 to 14. This was a great opportunity to work with professional actors and directors from the highly acclaimed theatre company ‘Dumbshow’. They also got to work with other students from BSME schools during drama workshops, rehearsals and performances. Dumbshow’s physical storytelling of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Pearl’ was imaginative and thought provoking combining physical theatre, song, imagery and clever use of props. After a fantastic breakfast banquet on day 2 we made an early departure for Sherborne Qatar where we were put into groups to participate in workshops run by the professional actors.

We participated in workshops inspired by the previous night’s performance of physical storytelling, voice, characterisation, masks, improvisation and physical theatre.  In the afternoon we created ‘platform’ performances where we had to use a specified space and just our bodies to create a performance based around a theme; this was challenging but fun and the performances were really creative. Day 3 was performance preparation day. We were again put into groups and given one of Grimm’s fairytales as inspiration; Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. We had to create a performance using inspiration from the professional performance and the workshops. We finished the whole experience with our performances which were highly polished considering the short time we worked on them, very funny and used all the skills and techniques that we had developed over the 3 days. Everybody returned exhausted but exhilarated. New friends were made along with a real sense of pride and achievement at being a part of such a creative and fantastic experience.