English News
One the Bear - an empowering tale!
Candy Bower’s play, "One the Bear", is a dystopian allegory to the oppression that often gets overlooked in today's society. As Year 9 and 10 theatre students, we had the opportunity to see the hip-hop performance in the city. In the morning, we were given time to roam around seeking inspiration for the plays we are constructing in class. From set design, to lighting, to costume and textures, we ventured out to find anything that struck us as useful in representing the themes of our own script. Having taken photos of everything we found, we now have some inspiration booklets to help us when it comes to staging our plays.
When it was time to watch "One the Bear", we met our teachers back at the Arts Centre. After a passionate sing-along in the foyer to Bohemian Rhapsody (accompanied by some impressive piano skills), we entered the theatre to watch the play. What at face value was a tale about young bears and hunters, was truly a confronting allegory: a story about lost identities, oppression, societal standards and cultural heritage.
Bower's play follows the story of a young bear, One, who seeks a better life for herself and her tribe. After finding the path to fame, she begins to lose sight of her identity, her heritage and her values. She finds herself manipulated by the hunters and controlled by the media. Her tale is an empowering one, a relatable journey of personal growth. If our conversations after the play's conclusion say anything, we're sure to have some deep discussion about its themes in our classes to follow.
Nalini Jacob Roussety
Year 10
English Theatre Excursion
Recently, the Year 12s had the opportunity to watch a performance by ‘The Complete Works Theatre Company’ after school. The actors performed for us the comparative texts we are studying this year: Photograph 51, a play written by Anna Ziegler, and The Penelopiad, Greek mythology novel by Margaret Atwood.
Photograph 51 is a play based on the events of the DNA being discovered and focuses on the story of Rosalind Franklin, a female scientist who helped in the research of DNA but whose work went unacknowledged throughout history. Anna Ziegler’s play focuses on gender roles, particularly the role of women in a male dominated society, as Franklin is a female who works in a male dominated environment as a scientist.
The Penelopiad is a novel based on the Greek epic poem, the Odyssey, which is about a Greek hero called Odysseus and his journey home after the Trojan War. The Penelopiad is written in the perspective of Odysseus’ wife Penelope and tells the story of her time while waiting for Odysseus to return home from war. Similarly to Ziegler’s play, Atwood’s novel is set in a patriarchal society and where not only gender but also status determines a person’s fate.
The actors from the theatre company acted out specific scenes from one text which were significant to particular themes, such as gender roles, identity, storytelling, etc. and compared them to scenes in the other text in relation to the same theme. They also analysed each scene for us and different techniques were used to highlight different aspects of the play.
It was interesting to compare how two different forms of the same text each employed different techniques by which they conveyed the text's meaning and it was a great experience for us to learn through watching a visual interpretation of the texts. It provided us with an overall better insight into the play and its dramatic functions and is definitely recommended for the future Year 12s.
Grace Park
Year 12
