Over the course of the first semester, some students of Grade 11 participated in a nine-week drama program as one of their CAS projects after school. The aim of the program was to allow the students to develop their skills of speaking, performing, and interacting with one another.

For the first six sessions, the students worked on different areas of drama including improvisation, body movements, setting up a scene, and staging. At the start of each session, the teachers would use small warm-up activities to slowly engage the students into the world of drama. Then, little by little, they would introduce different concepts and give the students an opportunity to perform in front of their peers.

The last three sessions were dedicated to a final performance project that the students created solely on the basis of the Hamlet monologue “To Be or Not to Be”. The students decided their own groups, wrote their own scripts, and rehearsed their performances without the help of teachers. This provided a great opportunity for the students to collaborate with each other and to take initiative themselves.

The final performance was on December 2nd, 2020, the last of all the drama sessions. As the students busily rushed into the Zhentao Lecture Hall with their costumes and scripts, they were ready for the presentation. One group performed an interesting time-travel story that was caused by a 2B pencil named “2B or Not 2B”. Another group presented an emotional play about a fake suicide hotline that eventually saved people from committing suicide. In general, there were a lot of creative performances ranging from a Disney musical all the way to an internal analysis of the angel-and-devil dynamic.

In the end, the drama program was a huge success. All of the students were able to step out of their comfort zones and challenge themselves with something new.

(Written by Sammi Liu Pictures by Zhen Yu Edited and Supervised by Sijia He)