Senior School Performing Arts

Musical 2024

The anticipation continues to grow as a number of favourites were removed from the Musical reveal wall over the past week. Now with two musicals being removed each day, the 2024 production will be announced before term's end. Whatever the final choice, it is set to be a phenomenal production and a wonderful opportunity to showcase the immense talent on display at Kinross Wolaroi (both on and off the stage). 

Encore Recording

Although Year 12 2023 have officially left school, Music students spent most of Monday recording HSC performances for their Encore nominations. Thank you to their accompanists Mr Moxey, Mrs Moxey, Mr Shaw, Mrs Perrin and Ms Li for going above and beyond once more. 

Nine Lessons & Carols

SUNDAY 3 DECEMBER, 4PM AT HOLY TRINITY CHURCH

This term our choirs and orchestra students are presenting a traditional Christmas Carol service, with free admission to the public.  We are hoping that this event will provide us the opportunity to spread a bit of Christmas cheer and also to foster links with the broader Orange community.  Further information has been emailed to our performers. Please come along and enjoy the Christmas Spirit!

2024 Orange Chamber Music Festival

KWS Orchestra are excited to be involved in next year’s Cultured Orchestra project, part of the 2024 Chamber Music Festival.  Cultured Orchestra is a massed youth orchestra, drawing musicians from the Central West of NSW.  The orchestra will be performing in the Southcourt area outside the Regional Art Gallery on Saturday 2 March, 2024.  There will be a series of rehearsals for this project, with further information to come.  Please save the date!

Year 11 Music Concert

Students in Year 11 Music will be presenting a short concert in the Performance Theatre on Monday 20 November, at 5:30pm.  Please come along to support our fabulous Year 11 students.

Key Dates – Term 4

Reflection on Belvoir Regional Theatre Workshop 

On Tuesday 24 October, Drama students in Years 9 and 10 participated in a theatre workshop on character development with Alex from Belvoir. 

Alex began with an introduction and then we were straight into a very worthwhile exercise on leading from certain body parts in movement. It was a worthwhile exercise as it allowed us to think about the development of different characters’ stance and movement especially and how to physically create a character. A skill which is particularly useful for actors who have to play multiple characters or roles. 

We put this first exercise into practice with some duologues. Pairs of students were given duologue scripts, without any context. We were given the opportunity to build our own context through movement and speech. We then performed these to each other. Different groups created opposing contexts to each other’s even with the same script. It was a process of discovery to realise the context behind their scenes. 

Our final activity was reading an extract from the play “Girl Asleep”.  None of us had seen the play before so we built a shared context around the play and our own personal one as well. We finished with an activity called “hot seating” which is where a student takes on the role of the character and participates in an interview. Jess Thompson and Oli Dillon played the character ‘Elliot’ from the extract and answered questions in role. It was fascinating the way each of us took the story and built our own characters and understandings. 

The workshop was a very useful study in character development. 

By George Hogg (Year 10 Drama)

On the 24 October all  Year 12 Elective Drama students participated in a workshop run by Belvoir Theatre Company. Year 12 were fortunate enough to have two sessions which focused on content relevant to our HSC studies in Drama. During our first session we explored character development and learnt how to bring a character to life from the script.  We then applied our newfound knowledge to the HSC text ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ which we are currently studying as a class. A long with sharpening our acting skills, we also had an insight into the directing aspect of theatre and applying our theoretical understanding of the play, characters, and elements of production to our experiential learning when staging it. This session required us to position ourself as director and consider the relationship between director and actor and consider how we shape the play in the space.  This is useful as it allows us to consider how to move the text from play to stage and focus on the dramatic framework and audience engagement.

Our second session focused on group devising and how to develop a performance as a group based on a given stimulus. We worked on developing our relationship, communication and listening skills as well as how to receive feedback to shape a performance. This was useful as we move towards creating our HSC Major work performances. 

This experience has been truly valuable for us, and we have all certainly gained some new skills that will assist us all as we work on our major works in HSC Drama.

By Georgia Williams (Year 12)

School Musical for 2024!

It is that exciting time of year when the musical for 2024 is announced. Like last year, a reveal wall has been set up outside the Performance Theatre with 45 different musical options on display. Each day two or three musicals will be removed with the final musical being announced just before camps week! Already seven musicals have been taken down: Jersey Boys, Chess, We Will Rock You, Hair, Bye-Bye Birdie, Beetle Juice and Dear Evan Hansen. What will remain? It is anyone’s guess. Stay tuned!