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THE ALLEYNIAN 710
Going live
Whether treading the boards of the Edward Alleyn Theatre or seeing shows in the West End, students have relished every opportunity to experience live performance once again, says Kathryn Norton-Smith
brawls for a hilarious adventure across a cyber-punk landscape. Small in scale, it was big in ambition, and a real treat for the year group. As Dance goes from strength to strength, coach loads of pupils visited the Peacock Theatre for Zoo Nation’s Message in a Bottle and Sadler’s Wells for Matthew Bourne’s iconic Nutcracker . The headline for this year has been collaboration – not just across the performing arts departments and the wider school body but beyond school and the classroom, locally and nationally. A-level pupils collaborated in a workshop with Playground Theatre following an afternoon of vital political theatre at the Tabernacle Theatre with scenes from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry re-enacted in Value Engineering , while in a collaboration with the Classics Department, senior pupils were award-winners in the Oxford University Ancient Drama performance competition. Drama schemes have been at the heart of free learning initiatives, including the beautiful dance theatre scheme threaded through Lower School learning in Sustainability Week, and Year 11 enjoyed a mindful movement into Charleston dance workshop during Mental Health Awareness Week. The EAT hosted
Our dramatic programme is now pretty much back at full strength after the frustrating impacts of the pandemic, and this year has already borne witness to an array of terrific theatrical activity, embracing academic, free-learning, supra-curricular and co-curricular opportunities. Recognising the value and delight afforded by the live theatre experience, we were straight out of the blocks at the start of the year, just as theatres reopened. Students from every year group have experienced stylistically diverse productions, including the dazzling Operation Mincemeat at the Southwark Playhouse, Bess Wohl’s new play Camp Siegfried at the Old Vic, Ocean at the End of the Lane at the Duke of York’s, Emma Rice’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights at the National Theatre, and the Vaults transfer of SpeedDial at the Pleasance Theatre, as well as old favourite The Woman in Black and the musicals Matilda and The Lion King . The whole of Year 8 saw Robert Icke and Toby Olié’s Animal Farm at the Churchill Theatre, and Year 9 relished Lewis Doherty’s one-man show Wolf , which he brought to the EAT. This was epic storytelling live on stage playing homage to film noir tropes, with the actor bringing to life 30 characters, car chases, and multi-man
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