THE PLAYING SPACE SYLLABUS
Classes at The Playing Space start at age four and continue to eighteen. During the course of the year, our classes cover a wide range of performance and communication skills and encompass individual and group work. Most of our students take an annual LAMDA Exam at Christmas and take part in our drama festival or full theatrical production in the Spring.
Autumn Term
In this term we work on scripts and texts. Our youngest students work on understanding and learning a poem. Our older students’ work depends on what they are studying with us.
Actors work on short scenes, either individually or in pairs. (At higher levels these scenes might be from classical or contemporary plays.) Public speaking students work on speeches and presentations. Students studying verse and prose work on preparing a range of literary texts for performance.
Most of our students work towards a LAMDA Exam at Christmas, though it is not compulsory. Some students choose not to take an exam.
Spring Term
In this term we work on group performances. These are usually acted scenes, but some groups work on poetry recitals or collaborative public speaking. The scenes we work on sometimes come from published plays, but often our students adapt scenes from favourite books or devise their own scenes.
This term’s work is geared towards presenting our group work at our fabulous annual Festival of Music and Drama, when we take over The Bull Theatre in Barnet for a whole weekend at the end of March.
Summer Term
In this term we work on performance and communication skills. The term’s work depends on the age and interests of the students in a class. Here are some of the mini courses our students have taken in recent years:
Performance: Mime, Improvisation, Physical Theatre, Characterisation, Method Acting, Screen Acting.
Communication: Verse Speaking, Prose Reading, Public Speaking, Sight-Reading, Story-telling.
Because of the work we do in the summer term, all our students develop a range of skills. And importantly, this is the term when we do drama for the sake of drama, without an exam or performance at the end.
What happens in a class?
A typical fun-filled class includes drama games, physical work, breathing and voice exercises, stage technique, and communication skills. At higher levels, we cover voice production and stage technique in more depth. Higher-level classes might also include a theoretical element, covering subjects such as character and objective, context and subtext, theories of acting, style and period and theatre history.
Who’s It For?
Everyone! We see drama as a tool for self-development in all areas of life. We provide a fun-filled and supportive environment in which our students can practise expressing their ideas, as well as listening to others. We think that drama is the best way of helping young people to remain confident as they negotiate the early stages of their life. Drama feeds the imagination, broadens the horizons and nurtures empathy. Drama is storytelling: at The Playing Space we listen to, share and climb inside a wide range of stories. Drama opens our students’ eyes to different cultures, different experiences and different ways of seeing the world.
Opportunities
Although The Playing Space is not a stage school, we have some very gifted actors among our students. We put a number of our students forward for professional castings or auditions. Some of our older students audition for drama school (and we help them to prepare their pieces). While at The Playing Space, students have a number of pathways to taking part in full-scale productions, either those we stage ourselves or those staged by local theatre groups.
THE FESTIVAL
Sometime around Easter every year, The Playing Space takes over the Bull Theatre in Barnet for a whole weekend! Over the course of six shows (three on Saturday and three on Sunday), every class presents a showcase performance of what they have been working on during the Spring Term (which is devoted to group work). Each show involves a cross-section of our students, encompassing a range of ages and performance categories (such as scripted scenes, devised scenes and public speaking).
LAMDA exams
All students at The Playing Space have the option of taking a LAMDA Exam in subjects including acting, public speaking, verse and prose reading and devising. LAMDA Exams are highly thought of by schools and colleges, and the medal exams earn UCAS points. We have been preparing students for LAMDA Exams for over ten years and get consistently high results. Our students enjoy taking them.