Back in the 1990s, one of the schools I taught at in Japan had a tradition of performing a school play in English. In fact, they even gave up most of one term to this rather chaotic project, and asked me to come up with a play that the students could learn and prepare for.
I decided to write my own, as this would enable me to adapt the language and aspects of the play to the needs and abilities of the students. One concern was to have a play with enough parts to keep most of the students busy with English. Former plays had most of the students in support roles where they did not use much English.
With these goals in mind, the obvious thing was to write a play that combined lots of well-known fairy tales, both Western and Japanese, as this would greatly increase the number of speaking parts while also giving the students roles or characters that they were already familiar with. The play was framed as the somewhat confused dream of a young girl whose father had told her too many bedtime stories with the result that all the characters had got mixed together in her head into a single narrative.
The play was performed by, I believe, six or seven classes, and was a great success by the standard these things are judged by. Someone took the trouble to video it. Kibidango, by the way, is an old Japanese confectionery that plays a prominent role in the Japanese tale of Momotaro. Just like Hitchcock, I made a fleeting cameo appearance.
I decided to write my own, as this would enable me to adapt the language and aspects of the play to the needs and abilities of the students. One concern was to have a play with enough parts to keep most of the students busy with English. Former plays had most of the students in support roles where they did not use much English.
With these goals in mind, the obvious thing was to write a play that combined lots of well-known fairy tales, both Western and Japanese, as this would greatly increase the number of speaking parts while also giving the students roles or characters that they were already familiar with. The play was framed as the somewhat confused dream of a young girl whose father had told her too many bedtime stories with the result that all the characters had got mixed together in her head into a single narrative.
The play was performed by, I believe, six or seven classes, and was a great success by the standard these things are judged by. Someone took the trouble to video it. Kibidango, by the way, is an old Japanese confectionery that plays a prominent role in the Japanese tale of Momotaro. Just like Hitchcock, I made a fleeting cameo appearance.
No comments:
Post a Comment