Fine Arts programming offered at Standard School
Manny Everett
Times Contributor
This year there has been an initiative at Standard School, which was supported by their parent council, to encourage the participation of students in a Fine Arts Program. In addition to an initiative for an elementary fine arts program, they decided to run a drama program that incorporated music elements into performance. Since it varied slightly from a traditional drama class, it was thought it might generate more interest.
The students involved in the first semester of the program were as follows: Taylor Stewart, Jestin Ross, Chanelle Daw, Ronja Trapp, Lyndsay Goebel, Christian Rousselle, Morgan Miller, Sami Bryant, Rhianna Many Heads, Kaitlin Frank, Cassandra Shaw, Macaleigh Stewart. These students designed their own production from start to finish.
Writing their own story line was both simple and complex. They wanted to show the struggle of acceptance at high school from different points of view. Teacher Ed Yu said, “There’s always drama at high school, we’re just trying to create it… on purpose”.
The choreography came from a few of Yu’s ideas and the collaboration of the students. Yu said, “I do not have a background in dance so I spent some nights watching some dance moves on YouTube and quite a few hours practicing. I assured my colleagues that I was working.”
This was an opportunity for the students to experience a dramatic production from start to finish, and gave them the opportunity to develop their own characters from scratch.
Creating their own production was a lot of work. It allowed for some flexibility since the classroom improvisation built the story into the final production. Additional lines and songs were inserted on the fly. There were times during the semester where as a class, they had writer’s block and “they almost pulled out the gloves” said Yu, “but we worked through those challenges quite well.”
Anyone involved in performance will know that the preparation involved can lead to a few struggles, but Yu says that he is very proud of how the students came together.
One of the challenges they faced was turning a class of mostly non-singers into a group of singers. They had the advantage of having a couple of very talented singers with them in the form of Lyndsay Goebel and Ronja Trapp. Ronja is an exchange student from Germany here for a semester. They appreciated her talent in singing and playing the piano, and she will be missed next semester when she returns to school in Germany to finish out her year at home.
The theme of the production surrounded the subject of acceptance, either of accepting someone who is different, obvious in the case of girls coming to a boys’ school, but also the subtle themes of acceptance for an exchange student, or a hopeless romantic, or the nerd. It was a simple formula that touched on many real issues of going to school and the students did excellent work in allowing that message to find its way through the play.
Yu along with the rest of the staff are proud of what the students were able to accomplish since the production was in all aspects “theirs” from start to finish.
With this production a success, the staff hope that the fine arts program will continue to grow at Standard School with the help of backing from Parent Council who helped provide funds to purchase the stage lights for the first production of many to come.