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Ms. Shelly Quick - Performing Arts Teacher
In the first semester of this academic year, the Drama students in high school took on an epic challenge – putting up a piece of Epic Theatre
The performance, entitled Galileo, was based on Bertolt Brecht’s play "The Life of Galileo" and took place at the end of November.
For many audience members, attending the play was a novel experience from start to finish. To begin with, the play was performed at more than one site in the school. In fact, Galileo sprawled across the high school campus, starting in the car park, moving to a traverse stage in the first courtyard, and finally ending in an arena-style stage in the second, innermost courtyard. The audience had to negotiate this space: upon their arrival, they made their way through protesting students, found their seats, and then were eventually standing again and moving through a masked, carnivalesque passageway to the second act, which was performed on the arena stage. All of this added to the fun and excitement of the performance.
The unconventional layout of Galileo was not only fun, but also posed a great challenge for the performers. With audience members placed around the acting space, and sometimes moving with them through the different areas of the high school, the students always had to be in character. They also had to have a heightened sense of where they were in relation to the audience, including when audience members were behind them, to ensure that everyone could see the action on stage.
Set design, however, was not the only challenging aspect of the play. The text itself, partly created by the students themselves through a devising process, and partly taken from Brecht’s play, examined complex issues of truth, scientific method and religious faith. Although these questions make for interesting debates in TOK classes, they are not obvious crowd-pleasers for theatre goers. Add to this a broken, frequently disrupted narrative, multiple characters and long chunks of factual information thrown into the mix, and you have a play that would test even the best of actors.
One IB Theatre student reflected,
"In the beginning… when Ms Daphne and Ms Quick showed us the full script of Galileo, every single one of us doing the IB only saw gibberish written on the papers. We read it aloud during joint class time and in my opinion every single one of us had difficulties reading. This was because there were so many different characters, no one knew what the storyline of the play was about, and nothing made sense." to us.
Visual Arts
Galileo: The High School’s Epic Play