As the dust settles on our performance of Belmore Rocks last term, I wanted to give thanks to the massive crowd of friends and families who attended and created an environment of celebrations for the hard work of our students and staff. I want to share some insight and backstage stories into how we created this production for those who were lucky enough to see it on the day!

Our production was student led, but what does this mean?

Productions take a lot of work and I’m not sure there will ever be a better way to lessen my responsibilities of curating it than handballing it back to our students to do the hard part of creating the ideas and concepts! Our SRC students and wider student community used their imagination and creativity for this production. From the script, costumes, light colours, props, stage design and direction, song choices; if there was something to decide or plan, they were given the opportunity to make that decision. As you would have seen there were a few classes that had difficulties agreeing on choices, but from my perspective it was great to see a bit of personality shine through…and maybe a bit of conflict resolution!

This production began in the grey classroom with Mark, Olivia, and Livian working on a script for the untitled Belmore production in early term 2. We started with a few different ideas that involved people exploring the school, this evolved into some outrageous characters including Olivia as a clown, Livian as a businessperson, Ryan as Sonic the hedgehog, Mary as a cat, Erica as Louis from One Direction and Mark as a king/penguin/king of the penguins. The original idea was that our SRC students would be these characters of their choosing, but as anyone in Hollywood or on the west end would attest to…Costuming and time restrictions can destroy all the great ideas we have. So, as we progressed through the pre-production, we ended up leaving our characters behind in place for being ourselves!

At the beginning of term 3 classroom teachers were given the brief for what was expected from SRC for the production and the tasks that would need to be undertaken. Classrooms began working on different aspects of the performance from song choice to door design to their individual dialogue.

Our students began their acting journey, getting ready for the big screen and our big Belmore stage! I began filming and compiling footage of our SRC students acting for the storyline and students engaging with each other on and around new playground (how good is it!!). We ended up with around 90 minutes of footage to edit, a mix between SRC students looking very unenthused by all the delays between takes and a few minutes of useable footage!

On the big day of the Belmore Rocks performance some of our students started to become a bit anxious about their time on stage. I heard a little whisper that there may have been a quick read through of the Kylie Minogue story book with PLC4 in the library before their performance, in the book Kylie talks about having a bit of stage fright!

I don’t think I need to tell you too much about the performance, I think we all saw how well our students did! We were filming the performance, unfortunately the SLC7 performance was corrupted after the camera lost power once the audience stood up. I did see a few people recording at times so if anybody does have any footage of their performance, I would love to have a copy of it for the finished product of the Belmore Rocks! Recording. Please email the school at belmore.sch@education.vic.gov.au if you did happen to get any videos of that classroom!

We will be in contact in the coming weeks with some permission slips regarding the recording of the production. Thanks for reading a small snippet of my experiences helping our students run this performance, Troy.