The Wykehamist
to turn a picture of a classroom into a saga that included at least one school shooting. Kenny’ s, Hopper’ s and Phil’ s found romance, love and rescue in an AI rendered image of a pyramid. It wasn’ t long before the LAMDA dons decided it was time to move on.
After one or two other trivial episodes, we reached the piece de resistance – half an hour in time that will forever stick in the fourth years’ minds.‘ Sugar cubes?’ Surely not. After what had come before, we should have been prepared for anything. But even after hours of being mud creatures and swimming through honey, reenacting a sugar cube dissolving in a glass of water in groups of 4-6 caught us by surprise. But they were being serious.
I must say, I’ m impressed with the enthusiasm with which the task was met. Group after group delivered( often agonisingly) slow choreographies where everyone stood in a square and squatted lower and lower until they were sprawled across the floorboards of Musa. It was quite something. After each group performed the product of two hours’ worth of“ devising,” we were asked to do it again – this time, to music; music that we had no control over.
So each group went again, and for the first time that afternoon, we understood the point the LAMDA dons were trying to make. Amy Winehouse’ s Back to Black quickly transformed a bland choreography into something bawdily reminiscent of cabaret. 1920s vocals made the dissolving human sugar cubes astoundingly nostalgic. Soft piano melodies unlocked new depths of emotion and regret, all to the sight of our contemporaries slowly sinking into the ground. So there’ s one takeaway.
Whimsical as the afternoon was, we still weren’ t entirely sure how to take what we’ d“ learnt” in that session and implement it into our work with the Jun Men. Perhaps the Junior Drama Festival will prove the infamous devising workshop useful in the end. But only time will tell.
Jad Darkazally( D, 2021-) Arthur Marre( C, 2024-)
The props which can be used in Jun Play
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