Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - Senior School Production 2023
Performing Arts at Cransley is owned by our young actors.
ISA Awards 2022 Finalist for Excellence and Innovation in Performing Arts
At Cransley, Drama is not just for those few extravert, specialist stage animals who already ‘can’. Drama is for every pupil.
There is not a single child in the entire school who has not given of themselves in performance. This is our mission as a School with inclusivity at its heart. Indeed it always has been.
This cannot be achieved without Drama being given the freedom and flexibility, the investment and innovation to adapt around the creative needs of our pupils and their dedicated teachers.
So, let's start with the hard cash. Our Headteacher and Governing Board take delight in the subject - over £75,000 invested wisely in a complete renovation of our stage - from board to drape, from a panoramic cyclorama to bespoke lighting and sound systems, and refit of our Drama Studio annex. A true stage, both literally and metaphorically, on which to showcase our pupils.
For an exceptionally small school of 250 pupils to make such a substantial investment of money and resources hard-earned, especially during the economic fragility of a pandemic, takes heart and soul, hope and aspiration.
the COVID Drama pervades the School and we venture beyond the proscenium stage into ‘wonderland’.
No such virus did stop us! As much of our usual ways of working were restricted, and whilst the stage was being constructed, we remained determined not to settle for just online and desk-based learning, but created ‘Wonderland’, a promenade performance with Covid restrictions built into the Rules set down by the Queen of Hearts as part of the immersive concept.
Small audience group sizes were liberally misted with mock ‘hand sanitiser’ at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; the Queen of Hearts revelled in the use of her two-metre Distancing Stick so that she could feast on jam tarts alone; for the Courtroom scene, parallels between the audience’s experience navigating the strange, contradictory and unpredictable world of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and the trials and confusion of our own Covid-ridden world, were clear, and the Judge delivered the final heartfelt message of hope and strength for the future.
By the time we were performance-ready, another round of government restrictions were implemented meaning we could no longer perform indoors… and so, our cast of 38 increasingly level-headed actors decided to move their performance outside, acting under, and even up, trees, on picnic benches, on the stone steps, the table tennis table… and, for one performance, in the driving rain.
We will preserve our ‘Wonderland’ performance and bring it back in years to come, as a mark of a moment in time, reminding us of what we went through and how we coped, of our ability to be more creative, more adaptable, using creativity through drama to rise above challenges, find passion and ambition in such difficult times.
“As our children move up through school, we push past the boundaries of what is expected from ‘school performances’, and challenge ourselves in our choices.
What better way to teach children about performing arts than to empower them to perform and give them experience of a wealth of different genres?
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‘Walking Pages’
Not to be outdone, Year 8 have collaborated and devised their own piece of theatre this year, creating ‘Walking Pages’, another unique immersive promenade performance. An atmospheric introductory film (recorded and edited by two talented Year 8 students) set the scene and mission for the audience - to help the ‘world’s author’, a Ghostwriter, regain control of his many characters. Then followed the live action, with four staggered-start, concurrently running performances allowing spectators personal and unique interactions with almost 30 famous literary characters as they travelled through the rooms and corridors of our school building, in scenes written by our students.
The interactive element made each show unique, developing in our young actors' resilience, improvisation and communication skills, showing them just what a true performance team can achieve when trusted with ownership and responsibility.
Breadth of ability and talent
We aim for - and achieve - breadth in understanding and ability across all areas of Performing Arts. Actors design and create their own costumes, are responsible for their own props and staging, operate their own music and lighting, set and strike their own show, with further opportunity to enhance these skills in Stagecraft Club and Theatre Tech Club. B-tec students support lower school performances with their expertise and passion, as makeup artists for the vibrant junior school production of Babouska earlier this year, or operating the new lighting rig and radio mics.
“Our children are theatre makers, ‘let in’ to all aspects of creating performances, and therefore are learning broadly across all technical, design and production areas.
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Our annual ‘big musical’ saw our long-awaited new stage christened with silly string, splurge and high-level singing and dancing in the epic ‘Bugsy Malone’, this year choreographed by two of our national award-winning dance students. Pupils and staff embraced front-of-house opportunities, in role as waiters serving the glamorous 1920s audience canapes in our Speakeasy setting, or as bouncers asking for the secret password before allowing spectators to enter. Each year, our mixed age-group extracurricular show involves almost half our total roll-call of seniors, boosting and showcasing talent, and building bonds across the year-groups.
We are encouraging our children to be brave and resilient in what they choose to create and perform, and take leadership of it.
Some of the latest performers to grace our stage were the passionate and talented Year 7s with their ‘Project: Fairytale’, an upbeat comedy about a struggling movie production company, a home-grown performance serving the dual purpose of introducing our young actors to industry job roles (and potential future careers).
Our budding young Junior actors blew us away this year with their performance of Peter Pan, performing with such vibrancy, character and full voice. Our new venture and commitment for the Juniors is to further empower each and every Year 6 pupil to confidently express themselves in front of an audience, by tutoring and entering them for individual LAMDA exams, widening the impact of many years’ experience of successful LAMDA tuition and our exceptional exam results record.
Our students are carefully guided to explore and develop their own personalities through their characters - they are given choice rather than casting decisions made entirely for them, and, with gentle but firm encouragement, empowered to push their own boundaries and embrace and pursue individuality through their drama.
We are a small school, and it is essential to us that every single individual pupil benefits and grows through Drama and the Performing Arts and our school values could not be better demonstrated than within these subjects. We seek and find excellence in and through our Drama. We nurture relationships through our Drama. And we are ambitious and venture beyond, taking our drama students - which are all of our students - on that empowering journey with us.
“We encourage in our students an inquisitive and open mind, an active engagement; where they know theatrical performance is not a closed book of lessons to be learned, but full of open possibilities and exciting opportunities just waiting to be exploited and explored.”