Subject Overview

In a post-covid world, finding your voice within a community as a young person is more important than ever. Being a member of a Drama class, where all students build skills in collaboration, confidence and communication on a daily basis, allows them to feel a sense of belonging within our CCS community. These skills have very real world application not only in school but in all post-school contexts. Students develop strong relationships and challenge themselves on personal and academic levels through the various academic and performance challenges that this course provides.

In Drama we develop not only our storytelling skills, but also independence and ensemble skills. Throughout the two year program, students explore traditional play texts as well as contemporary performance forms from the multiple perspectives of actor, director, deviser and designer. They will review, analyze, plan, rehearse, and perform both published and original drama pieces returning to the key question: how do we effectively communicate ideas and feelings to an audience?

Performances will be presented regularly to our CCS community through events like CCS Arts Night and smaller scale afternoon sharing sessions of our work with parents and friends. These opportunities allow students to build confidence and pride in their skills beyond the walls of the conventional classroom setting.

As this course is designed to prepare students for the IB Theatre program, we explore a range of naturalistic and non-naturalistic performance styles, practitioners and traditions from around the world and different times in history. An exciting part of these explorations for many students is exploring some of the beautiful traditions of Balinese performance, which include Kecak,Topeng, Legong and Wayang Kulit.

Assessment

Through each unit of work students are assessed through the lenses of:

Knowledge and Creative Thinking - Challenges that help develop our research, language, design and analysis skills.

Application of Skills - Challenges where we improve our individual and group performance and presentation skills, applying these to creative projects that demonstrate contextual understanding.

Process Journal - Reflective and evaluative writing; exploring goal setting, creative processes and articulating learning experiences and decision making.

Irrespective of a student’s plans after high school, Drama is the ideal medium for fostering empathy, curiosity, design, writing and presentation skills, perseverance and community engagement. Our Drama program encourages a vibrant, connected and active educational experience for year 10 & 11 students. It is also a wonderful bridging program between middle school Drama and the innovative IB Diploma Theatre course.

CCS Drama Video