Thursday 9 February 2012

The children are spending too long rehearsing / It’s changed over the last few years / More technique please


We started Best with the idea of doing one public show a year and then occasionally inviting parents in to see the kind of things the students had been up to during the term. More and more we found the pressure was increasing for us to ‘prove value’ and that our end of term showings were being misinterpreted as quasi-full-on shows. This is not the case but we feel that we may have blurred the boundaries somewhat recently through staging Alice, then a panto with Robin Hood, and then going into our planned public show.

The pressure to deliver this perceived value (i.e. an end result) means that we have less time to teach technique and to let the children experiment and relax. We want to bring that back. 

So we intend to revert back to our original schedule with one full production a year (at Easter) and then for the other two terms taking the focus off rehearsal and line learning and back onto technique, progress and real teaching. To be honest it would be a massive relief to all of us and we think to the students as well. We just have to be better at communicating with you, the parents, exactly what it is the children are doing each term. In this way we can have much more fun and the children will progress much faster. 

And you’ll still get to see things at the end of term – just not ‘fully rehearsed shows’ so it will be much more representative of what the children have been up to.

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