Dolphin's Drama Blog

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Hello and welcome to Dolphin’s Drama blog - a place for you to discover:

-     what the department is up to

-     any theatre recommendations we may have

-     our latest thoughts about Drama and its intrinsic value educationally

Have a read, and if you have any suggestions for future posts, do let us know.

 

Post 1 - All the world’s a stage or Site Specific Theatre - September 2020

So the world has closed down for a while and there are very, very few theatres able to open their doors for school groups.  No Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre workshop, no Christmas pantomimes, not even the chance to perform our show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

But despite the world feeling wobbly, the ever resourceful Dolphin School is discovering new ways of working, and the Drama department is holding its own.

 

Long time collaborator, Julian Spooner, from Rhum and Clay Theatre Company, popped down from London to spend the day with us exploring site specific theatre in Ophelia’s beautiful Tudor garden.  Working outside with the natural environment brought its own adventures and trials, not least the British weather and prickly tree branches, but most importantly it steered us away from linear storytelling.  There was more room for experimentation as to how we could use found spaces to full advantage rather than being constrained by a conventional theatre space.

 

Having a whole day to work on a specific theatrical style is a rare treat and we didn’t waste a moment.  By lunchtime layers of history had been considered with characters from different centuries populating the garden, mysteries had been created in the middle of the maze and we finally found ourselves moving around rose trees in ways we could never have imagined before.

 

Finally our audience of 3 joined us for a presentation of our work in progress.  There is little doubt that this audience felt more involved in the world of the story  as they followed the performers into the woods and around the garden than if they had been sitting in a conventional theatre.  Site specific theatre is ambitious and unpredictable; it is a happy accident when the weather, the light, the environment and the performance all come together.

 

As so often is the case, we were left with more questions than answers - how do you animate a space effectively?  Is the history of a space important for the narrative?  How might the work be revealed to the audience?  Where is the heart of the site?  Can you even tour a site specific piece of theatre?  How do you make Ophelia’s garden accessible for wheelchair users?  And what exactly is Landscape Theatre as opposed to Site Specific Theatre?

 

All the world truly is a stage, and whilst this cruel pandemic initially stopped Dolphin Drama department in our tracks, it has also invited us to consider new ways of working and it has vastly extended the range of our performance and what we understand of performance. 

 

As we walked away echoes of the various characters reverberated in my head, and who knows maybe even the ghosts of people who had walked in this garden many, many years ago…

 

 

(Thank you, Julian, for inspiring us once again.  And thank you, Ophelia, for lending us your garden so generously. Here is the link to a short movie documenting the experience of the day: https://vimeo.com/461851896/64c1bdb598 )