Up, up and away 2021!

Hurray, hurray! All our Helen O’Grady Pretoria and Midrand Studio venues have opened at last! 

And yes, I know, it’s the 6th of March already, but as with so many things lately, it has been a bit of a slow start. But that does not mean we haven’t been busy. 

Thanks to Zoom, we were able to at least kick off 2021 with online classes until we were able to meet face to face once more. And what a pleasure it has been to see each other after such a long December and January holiday. 

 Of course, we still offer Zoom classes for those who prefer to continue online, and we are still not free of all the protocols and precautionary measures brought on by COVID-19, but thanks to the support and trust of our students, parents and community, we are able to spread the love and joy of doing Drama, being creative, connecting with our peers and building confidence and life skills once again! 

We are so grateful and excited about this year and can’t wait to see what fantastical things it brings!

Welcome to Term 4!

 Welcome to our final term for 2020. I can hardly believe we have only two months left of this most unusual school year! 

Term 4 has, like the rest of 2020, brought new and exiting ways to teach Drama. At our Pretoria and Midrand studios we have adopted a hybrid system for the last push to the end of the year. We are still running Zoom classes, but we are happy to report that we have been able to also start ONSITE classes at some of our studios. It is such a pleasure to be in the same space as our students again, even if it is at a distance! 

 As it is not possible to go back to all our schools, YET, and the independent venues are not always practical for the parents, we are continuing with Zoom classes for anyone who prefers the online platform for now. 

 We have also started working on our year end productions, with onsite and Zoom students. How exciting! We can’t wait to show our families, friends and fans what we can achieve when we put our creative minds to it, in whichever way, shape or form we can!

ONSITE.....

ONLINE....

The choice is yours!

“SUPPER THEATRE” a roaring success at the Theatre Domicile

We ended off our third term with a Bang! All our Upper Primary students, and a selection of Lower Primary students hosted a re-imagined version of our Parent Presentations. Normally our students do a group Parent Presentation, where they get to show off what they learnt during the term. This term we had to put a bit of the twist on it and it was in the form of a Supper Theatre performance in their own homes.

                                         

All students had to plan and perform a show, which included a 3-course meal, as well as a variety of items performed while the audience enjoy their various courses. They designed posters, tickets, menus, and programmes. They had to create a stage, set with props and costumes. They had to be the MC and the waiter, or enlist their siblings to help. 

.           

The Upper Primary students had to perform a solo interpretation of a traditional Verbal Dynamics item, Cities, as well as a Monologue, and an improvised advertisement. The Lower Primary Students who chose to do the Supper Theatre, performed a dramatized prose, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen, and a poem from our Term 3 selection. 

We encouraged the students to be creative and put their personal stamp on the event, so some students wrote their own monologues and added items to their performance, changed the “supper” to a “picnic”, and helped prepare the food and used it for their advertisements.

We asked the students to take lots of photos and videos so we could all share in the fun, and from what we received, it was a roaring success all round. The parents clearly enjoyed the performances and the food, and the students loved showing off their work. When asked for feedback after their performance, the one word used to describe their show most often was “amazing”. Time and time again: “It was AMAZING!” 

How wonderful that we could bring enjoyment, fun and excitement to our students’ homes and families. 

 

This year has been so challenging for everyone, but it has pushed us in so many ways to re-invent and re-imagine old favourites, and each time the result was so, well, amazing!  

Let’s keep this momentum and level of enthusiasm going into Term 4, where we are once again going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to make our year end productions live up to our tried, tested and much adored live shows.

Me, myself and I

The new term has started, and we are off to a running start.

As with everything we have been doing since the dreaded pandemic struck the globe, we have had to put a new twist on what we are teaching this term. For the most part we are still working online, and, in some cases, we have a bit of a hybrid system going.

The third term is usually when we start working on our year-end productions and planning on which plays we will be doing with our respective groups. This is by far one of the most exciting times in our calendar for teachers and students alike. But, for obvious reasons we had to relook our strategy.

The Helen O’Grady way is really based on a lot of teamwork and teaching the students how to be a part of a whole, having your moment in the limelight and giving your friends their chance to shine as well. Encouraging and helping each other to achieve a common goal. Many of our classroom activities, and especially our year-end productions are built around this. All of these are such amazingly valuable life skills for students to learn. As far as the productions are concerned, we will have to put this on ice and change things up a bit.

So, for example, this term we are challenging our Upper Primary students to focus more on individual performance skills using Monologues and adapting our Verbal Dynamics group activity to a one-person performance. It is actually very exciting to be able to give the students an opportunity to work on a different skill set focussing more intensively on the self with characterisation, speaking directly to the audience and communicating inner feelings. Making good eye contact (or speaking directly into the camera), and working on modulation techniques, like Pace, Pitch and Pause. And, how to use costumes and props to help with characterisation.

This will really push individual creativity and self-confidence. Especially for those who usually feel quite safe in the group activities and shy away from the individual challenges.

We are looking forward to what this term and this strange new world will bring! If there is one thing we have learnt this year is that our students are brilliant at adapting and doing whatever we throw at them.

The Rah-Rah file by Charlotte Tervit (Vice Principal HOG Drama Academy Pretoria (Pty) Ltd)

Many moons ago when I worked as a PA in the corporate world, my boss, the MD of an insurance company, used to keep a Rah-Rah file. Simply put, it was a brag file, a thing of pride, stuffed full of articles and information about our company’s achievements and accomplishments. Every now and again, he would take out the file, dust it off and page through it with pride.

This week’s post is dedicated to all the amazing Helen O’Grady drama teachers. As we come to the end of a truly unexpected, interesting, challenging and surprisingly fun term, I think we should all file this term and our mind-blowing achievements in our collective Rah-Rah file. In future, when we have a rough week, or just feel nostalgic, we can take it out, dust it off, page through it, and look around the room and say “Wow, we really did this! Well done me and well done all my amazing colleagues.”

There have been very few times in my life that I’ve been prouder to be part of an organisation as I am to be part of Helen O’Grady Drama Academy. And to be part of the greater fraternity of teachers everywhere, who worked so hard to bring education into the homes of our children during these unprecedented times, whilst navigating their own personal lockdown journey with their families at home.

So hats off to all you phenomenal ladies and gentlemen! Rah-Rah!

- Charlotte Tervit

Student Feedback:

The Grade 1-3 Reddam students Charlotte teaches on Zoom were asked to send feedback to her...here are some of their comments:

"I love everyone thing in drama but my truly favourite thing is you!"

"I really really really like the cruise ship one and I also like the one where we got to dress up as a bird it was really really fun, I love drama!" - HN

"I like drama a lot. I like doing the guessing game we played today. I also enjoy intro activities and the Octopus activity it was fun. Thank you Teacher 👌😘"- PT

"Thanks Charlotte that was fun 😂"- TB

"I really liked the drama exercise today teacher Charlotte because my mom and I acted it out" - HN

Parent Feedback:

"Ahhh thanks ... and thank you to you guys as well for making it such a fun lesson"  

"Thank you very much. My daughter is really enjoying every minute of class. The birdie mask, blanket, the matching colours... everything, she did on her own  Thank you for being an awesome teacher too!"

"Thank you Juliet! Super fun for A!" - NB

"Class was awesome, Juliet!" - JP

"Thank you, the session was brilliant!" - SZ

Another Day, Another Plot Twist!

One of my favourite sayings at the moment is:

If something doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, just yell “plot twist” and continue to Sparkle! 

The one thing that is certain at the moment is that everything is uncertain. We plan and plot and just when we think we've got a handle on things, understand the game, someone yells “Plot twist” and the rules change and it's back to square one. And so the plot thickens.

One such area is the reopening of schools and the rules and regulations around it. It is causing much frustration for parents, but sadly also confusion and even anxiety for our kids. While venting about this and processing my own frustration, it dawned on me that once again we have a wonderful teaching opportunity here. We can teach our kids to roll with the punches.

Pre COVID 19 our lives, and importantly our children’s lives, were for the most part very structured (some lives more so than others) but nonetheless, it followed a very clear and certain path. All of a sudden it is all up in the air and things seem to change on a daily basis.

Perhaps we can teach them the life lesson that things do change and that things don't always work out the way we planned. But we as humans can adapt, embrace the challenges and try to make the best of it - the whole life and lemon thing comes to mind....

But even if there is not a jug of refreshing lemonade at the end of the tunnel, we can still roll with the punches, work through the tough times and make it to the other side. Pretending that going back to school under the new circumstances will be fun is possibly setting the children up for disappointment, but they will get through it and they will get used to it. Or if they are not going back to school at all, explaining that they won't be with their friends every day might seem like punishment, but they might end up looking at the world in a whole new way.

Our drama classes can be a great example of how change is not always a bad thing. We have been able to bring high quality and fun drama lessons to all our kids making use of various digital platforms. But we can go back to face to face classes at any time and have awesome classes, or even do a hybrid of the two. We do not need to view the change from the one to the other as bad, just as a new chapter.

We, the teachers and students of Helen O’Grady Drama Academy, can adapt, change and embrace this new reality. As I’ve mentioned before, drama is so fluid and, well, creative that we can make great performance art out of almost anything and any situation we find ourselves in. Social Distancing? No problem, we just inflate our drama bubbles a bit and exploit a good opportunity to work on projection. Protective gear? Bring it on, we love dressing up – hazmat suits are the new black! 

Our classes are incredible, our content is pliable and we are even adapting our year-end productions to, not just a sad watered down version of what it used to be, but an exciting, thrilling new challenge that the children will love. (Watch this space for more on that!)

The important thing is that we SHALL keep going and we SHALL be there for our drama students and we will come out of this in the end with bells on! 

So just yell “plot twist” and continue to sparkle!

The Show must go onLINE!

What an exciting few week this has been. Our online lessons have been running virtually flawlessly (see what I did there? 😉) and we are all getting into the rhythm of this new reality we are living. Our students have had an absolute ball doing online drama classes, those who were not able to join our live Zoom lessons have sent us videos of themselves following our online content posted on various platforms. It is quite amazing how good humans are at adapting to new circumstances!

And I have to say our students have been just amazing! They just took to this “new normal” like ducks to water. They are happy to go online to do their schoolwork, extra-mural activities and to see their friends. For the first time ever, they are not getting into trouble for the amount of “screen-time” they are having, and parents are encouraging them to go online! And surprisingly what I have witnessed at home and heard from friends is that children are choosing to spend time away from their screens playing outside, getting fresh air and exercise. Before this we couldn’t pry them away from their cell phones and iPads!

Of course, we can’t wait for children to go back to school and back to doing face to face Drama classes, but until then, we will harness the full power of the online world and enjoy every minute of it!

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times

The title of this weeks’ blog is a bit of a play on the opening line of Charles Dickens’ novel, Tale of Two Cities. I changed it around a bit as I think this is really a tough time for all of us, maybe even the worst we have ever lived through. There is a lot of fear and uncertainty about our way of life and when things will go back to “normal” (whatever that may turn out to be).But the strange thing is that in some respects it has also become the best of times!

The best time for creativity and innovation - thinking outside the box - to keep the wheels turning and to keep people connected, be it for work or to connect with friends and family. And it is no different for us at Helen O’Grady Drama Academy here in Pretoria and all over South Africa, and in fact all around the world. We are having online staff meetings, making videos, meeting our students in chat rooms and creating online content.

To be honest it has been a load of fun to figure out the best way to connect, making and sending silly videos out to our Helen O’Grady family to keep the spirits up, and how we can transform our live lessons into live streaming lessons. Drama is perfect to go on-screen – it’s dynamic and exciting and gets the creative juices flowing. It forces the kids off the couch, to move their bodies, jump, dance and laugh, whether they are watching pre-recorded content or during a live streaming lesson.

Not only can we do our conventional lessons in video format, but teaching our students on-camera performance techniques, how to film themselves using camera techniques like the best angles, lighting and camera shots, and how to use the latest technology to record and edit video clips are just an awesome by-products of our new line of attack. Even teaching them a universal skill like using online chat platforms like Zoom or Google Chat which they will be using in all walks of life in the future, from social interaction, to conference calling with colleagues and running online businesses.

It has also been really great for all the principals and teachers to discover new technology and forcing us to look at what we do in a new light and all the exciting possibilities that exist in the way we deliver and offer our Helen O’Grady lessons in the future. Online lessons could very well become part of the options we have available for students, especially students in areas where we do not currently have studios or opportunities for students from across the globe to connect with each other and collaborate in special projects.

Who knows?! …At the moment it feels like the possibilities are endless. And if this horrible, scary virus didn’t grip our planet in an icy grip of fear and uncertainty, we would never have explored these ideas and come up with all these awesome innovations to overcome an obstacle we never saw coming.  In closing we would like to give a shout out to everyone who follows our blog - during this time of lockdown and self–isolation….stay safe, stay healthy, stay focused and stay strong!