TES British Secondary & High School Section - NewsLetter | Page 3

Issue 12

Page 3

News from the English Department
Jonathan Booth, Head of English
Our current IB Language and
Literature H4 students are
busy revising for the Individual
Oral Commentary assessment
this week. This year the English
Department have agreed to
complete these assessments
earlier in the academic year,
thus avoiding the ‘bottleneck’
of assessments for senior year
students across the school
from November onwards. This
also means that for English
there can be a longer preparation for heavily weighted formal
examinations in June 2016.

The Individual Oral Commentary is an analytical close textual study of unseen extracts
from the following texts: Othello by William Shakespeare,
1984 by George Orwell and
the poetry anthology by Carol
Ann Duffy The World’s Wife.
Throughout H3, students have
been led through a critical understanding of these texts, as
well as a contextual understanding of the culture and
communication that surrounds
them: the language of rhetoric
(Shakepeare’s Iago in Othello,
whose usage is used to manipu-

late and influence for power);
language and power (Orwell’s
dystopian vision of a totalitarian
future, perhaps never more
relevant than for today’s society); and language and gender
(Duffy’s poetry satirising the
representation and deficit of
women’s language in all culture:
history, politics, science, literature and popular culture).
We hope all our current 2016
cohort of IB students will now
breathe a sigh of relief as the
weight of another key deadline
is lifted!

TES welcomes Theatre Practitioner Mark Hill
Rowena Bracken, Head of Drama
Mark Hill is an international
day 21st to Thursday 24th of
Physical Theatre performer and September, offering a range of
educator. For the past decade
he has trained and performed
with cutting edge Australian
companies Zen Zen Zo, The
Danger Ensemble and De Quincey Co. He has been a Butoh
dancer with Dairakudakan
(Japan) and SU-EN Butoh Company (Sweden) and has toured
the world with Cabaret Punk
musician Amanda Palmer of the
US band The Dresden Dolls.
On September 19th, Mark hosted an intense workshop for
Drama and Theatre Exam
groups on Japanese Butoh Theatre. He also joined the Drama
Department at TES from Mon-

Physical Theatre workshops to
all of Key Stage 3 and both
IGCSE Drama classes and IB
Theatre Students. Mark has
taught Physical Theatre

throughout Australia, Asia and
Europe, and he teaches extensively for ISTA (International
Schools Theatre Association).
I have been fortunate enough
to work with Mark in my previous schools and I found working with him to be hugely enriching, for both myself and the
students. The level of skill,
precision and perseverance
demonstrated by each performance group was outstanding.
Mark encourages students to
step into a world of imagination
that is breathtaking. I am certain that the students loved
having him working with them
this month.