At Reach Cambridge, the amazing team of supervisors plan a whole load of exciting activities for the students to take part in after their classes. Drama is just one of the activities available to Reach students. Wondering what this involves? Well you’re in the right place! Here’s what happened in one of our drama sessions in summer 2012. Ah, memories…
The session began with a selection of “energy” games and warm ups, building up to performing some scenes improvised by the students themselves. The “energy games” included several of those played earlier in the week to help the students get to know one another better.
After the warm up, the second half of the session comprised two improvisational games. The first was a form of tag team improvisation. A pair of students spent about thirty seconds improvising a scene before the supervisor shouted “Freeze!” at this point the actors froze in position and a volunteer from the audience replaced one of their positions, ready to begin again. However whilst starting from the same position, their challenge was to transform the setting to an entirely different scene, whilst being able to justify their original position: a formal handshake between diplomats might become someone receiving a trick electric-shock handshake from a clown for example.
The final game was “Death in three minutes” the students had about ten minutes in which they would devise a scene in groups of about four. The scene had to start in a seemingly innocuous setting (such as a hair salon, or a garden) and end, for a variety of inventive reasons, in the deaths of the entire cast. As you can imagine, the ideas generated ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
As you might well imagine, the drama was enjoyed by staff and students alike. It was a real pleasure to see the students getting an opportunity to interact with new friends and to really grow in confidence as a group. Above all it was a real treat to share in the collective inventiveness and eccentricity of a group of young people as warm and talented as we are lucky to have at Reach Cambridge. We can’t wait to see what summer 2013 has in store :)
