Live theatre at its best and free! Grade 8 is thrilled to present Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream at Waldorf Academy. The gym has been transformed into a theatre! Come and bring friends and family and be prepared to be in awe of our youth!
May 31
11:15 am
7:00 pm
June 1
11:15 am
7:00 pm
The pedagogical purpose of plays at Waldorf Academy:
The ultimate satisfaction of a class in its play is the successful immersion into the characters and the story of a play. Once the play is performed, the audience’s comprehension of the story, the laughter, and tears the performers feel for one scene or another from the audience are like icing on a well-baked cake. Children do learn to depend on each other in a new way from the ordinary, and students do change after deeply entering into a character unlike their own. Students find new voices in themselves, new motivations, new friends, a new appreciation for each other through interaction on stage. Sacrifice is needed for a good play: the sacrifice of one’s personality for another, sacrifice of preference for the good of the play, sacrifice of friends to interact with unlikely companions for the play, sacrifice of many preferences for the sake of a good play. And the sacrifice of repeated rehearsal might be the biggest sacrifice of all!
In the end, a class play is a lot of fun and excitement; the rewards of many weeks of hard work. Unlike other arts, it is such a social art and is shared socially with the whole community. Live theater is always thrilling because unlike a film; no one knows what is going to happen on stage nor how the actors will react. Many is the time that class teachers instruct, “Whatever happens remember who your character is and respond in that character, no matter what!” It brings lessons for life with these facts. It isn’t so much what happens — things will always happen — it’s how we respond that makes the story so compelling! So, practice for the play begets practice for life, a gift well beyond a performance or two!
