I work in a public high school in Taipei and am undertaking to organise/direct a medium size production, hopefully before CNY arrives.
I have a strong background in this kind of thing however, not with students who don’t speak English that well.
Yes. The play will be in English.
I have scrounged for a script online and found a few goodies, however I am wondering if:
a) anyone has done this before?
b) what you think my chances of success will be?
c) any ideas or tips for making this work!
Look forward to some discussion and perhaps seeding some ideas for others to do in future also.
I’ve done plays at my school zillions of times… not at a public school though… at an anquinban.
I think you can be successful… doesn’t matter if they can’t speak English that well. They will be able to memorize lines like they memorize everything here. Where you might get frustrated is with the lack of emotion or “oomph”… or the natural ability to enunciate words etc… they will sound like robots unless you train them to say their lines the way you want them to. This becomes tedious and will take a lot of practice on their part. You’ll probably have to go through each line and have them repeat after you to get any kind of non-robotic sound out of them.
What he said up on top of me. They will remember the ghettysberg adress if you ask them to but you will have to present every single line the way you want it said, and even with a lot of practicing they might just be a bunch of robots on the day. Peer pressure and all that.
No experience with juniour high but plenty with the young kids.
Make a sound recording of the entire script. Do the whole thing again but with space for them to repeat. Ask questions about the lines and leave a space for them to answer it before giving the answer. After ten minutes of script reward them with a musical interlude. That’s what I did it. It didn’t work, but then again nobody listened to the tape so I dunno, like, I just dunno, you know?
I just wrote, directed and gave a few acting lessons to a group of students from my school competing in an English drama competition at Kung Fu elementary school. The competition was fierce with 19 different groups competing. My group got second. The students who got first also attend my school, but they had a professional set designer and what not.
The secret to this kind of production is to make it funny with a lot of visual comedy and keep the language simple and appropriate to the students level. Too often people think that it is more impressive to have students reel off great slabs of English, like those ludicrous HESS adds. Nothing is more certain of failure.
Keep it short and simple. Make it funny and something the kids can relate to.
During my school’s summer camp I was in charge of “Drama week” and kids had about 3 practices to do a short skit. The group I had did things like “Harry Potter and the Big Bad Wolf” (the wolf and pigs were friends, but Harry didn’t know that), “The Lion, the Witch, and Harry Potter”, “Who Killed the Teacher?”, “Who’s Cheating?” (all kids are caught for cheating, all have the same wrong answer— but turns out that the teacher wrote the question wrong)
They practiced 3 times about an hour each time and did a passable job. Now these kids were pretty good-- they’re more creative than most and speak well when properly motivated. If you are dealing with kids with less English capability, keep the lines shorter.
Great tips from Fox and R. Daneel here. Not only does keeping playscripts within students’ real language abilities make sense from a performance point of view, it’s also much better for language learning. I really can’t stand it when kids are trained to rattle off large chunks of text without having much idea of what it all means. A complete waste of time.
