Happy New Year, Happy new beginnings!

At the start of a new year, and as it happens this time round also a new decade, we are so focused on starting fresh, leaving our old self behind. We love the thought of somehow escaping all the things we don’t like about ourselves and our lives and creating a new life in a new year. What a wonderful opportunity to reinvent ourselves!

In our Drama classes we give children the opportunity to reinvent themselves every time they come to class. They dress up, rehearse roles, become characters and explore life situations that they might never experience or be exposed to in their everyday life. It gives them the platform to discover different aspects of their personalities, likes and dislikes, how they would react to certain circumstances and even, often unbeknownst to us as teachers, help them make sense their real life   problems and see the situation from different angles.

Every Drama teacher can attest to the way some children just blow you away with their improvisation skills or characterisation when given a topic they have never explored before.  Sometimes they are as surprised as you are! They have unlocked something inside themselves: a way of speaking, moving and behaving or how to solve a problem they have never had to contemplate. And they don’t have to wait until the next New Year to do this, they can be a new version of themselves each week!

I hope this year we can let our Drama students’ creativity soar to higher heights, and we can help them explore who they are in all their facets, moods and talents, in order to become who they really want to be.