News
13 April 2023
Through participation in drama and theatre, students develop their creative capacity, learn about their own identity, and develop self-awareness, self-confidence, and a sense of wellbeing.
Learning experiences in drama and theatre involve intense collaboration and creativity developing students ability to engage with the world around them through thoughtful and empathetic artistic expression.
At Fintona, we seek to encourage in every girl, a love of her own imagination and unique perspective of the world and through drama and theatre communicate this to the world. As a collaborative art form, the study of drama and theatre enables students to share experiences, in a supportive and inclusive environment. Whether it be in the Junior School Drama classroom or on stage in a VCE production, everyone is important and everyone has something to contribute.
Through diverse drama and theatre learning experiences in the classroom and on stage, Fintona students develop an understanding of the breadth of the artform as creators, actors, directors, designers and members of the audience. This rounded exposure to diverse roles encourages students to develop skills that are specific to the artistic nature of drama and theatre and also those personal skills that will enable them to be successful in whatever pathway they pursue.
Performance Opportunities
Engaging in practical and imaginative creative activities to build self-awareness and confidence.
Fintona also presents an annual School Play in Term 3. All students from Year 7 and above are invited to audition for parts. Students are also involved in all areas of production, including (set and make-up) design, costume, lighting and sound.
Drama and Theatre Studies students stage an annual VCE production, as well as solo performance evenings.
Drama Day is a House Performance Competition held in December that is overseen by Year 11 students. It is one of the highlights of the year and involves all girls from Years 5 to 11.
Each House creates a movement piece and a dialogue piece based on a common stimulus to be presented at a public performance.
Antigone
After two long years without a Fintona School Play, in 2022 we were proud to present Jean Anouilh’s famous reinterpretation of Antigone. Despite rehearsals being affected by COVID absences, the wonderful cast and crew of students from Year 8 to Year 12, pulled together, supported one another and showed incredible commitment and dedication to bring the play to the stage.
The Red Shoes
Fintona’s 2019 production presented Hans Christian Andersen’s original story set against a background of conformity, in which an orphan’s passion for a pair of red shoes and the wild dancing which follows seems like an unconscious rebellion against the environment she finds herself in. Altogether more hopeful, our production arrived at a different conclusion to the one Andersen might have intended, where our young protagonist, Karen, learned that ‘life’s more than luck, or chance…because you make your own fortune when you dance your own dance’ through self-belief and love. Adopting an aesthetic sitting somewhere between Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, our interpretation of the fairy-tale magnified the grotesque elements and greed of human behaviour.
