#64

I included them because my surname is Serbian so has them too. In fact, the only reason I was given the role is because my sister and I were the only kids with Slavic/Serbian ancestry in the school, which means my own teachers racially profiled me as a genocidal maniac. :ok_hand:

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#65

The furniture bit :joy:

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#66

Something I was responsible for:

So my job (normally) is that I go round schools in Austria and Germany as part of an English immersion programme. Drama is one of the activities, and thereā€™s usually a show on the last day for the parents with short plays, skits etc, handing out certificates.

The students can be any age- middle school is the most common, but you often get older or younger ones too. I had a bunch of 6 year olds and they were too young for a whole play in English, so we did the Owl and the Pussy Cat. Each kid had a line to read out from a card, and we made some cardboard props of money, honey, spoons etc to act out the story.

However the kids also made themselves masks of the various animals in the poem and they were HORRIFIC. I obviously canā€™t share a photo for child protection reasons, but imagine something like this, but way more horrifying, of pigs, owls, cats, the moon etc.

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#67

Yep, not sure what cruel teacher came up with that bit! :grinning: Definitely donā€™t remember it in the film!

#68

Think the drama teacher had it in for our family

I felt hard done by as faginā€™s gang / pauper

But my younger bro played a windowsill

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#69

Feels like this ought to become a thing on DiS, any post longer than four paragraphs ought to have a

tapdancing interlude

randomly in the middle.

#70

Everyone better get practicing. All the neighbours are gonna love it while everyone is working at home.

#71

Eep, I think problematic racial casting were a thing at both my primary and secondary school. We did a play of the story of Ramadan at primary, and instead of the usual process of the insufferable drama kids all having to put themselves forward and audition for the lead roles, the only two Asian kids in the class were just automatically cast. We were a Christian school, all the kids there were Christianā€¦

Also in secondary the one time a black student was cast as one of the lead roles, they decided to reimagine that role as a James Brown impersonation. The rest of the play remained unaltered. :grimacing:

#72

JFC

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#73

At the first rehersal the teacher announced they were reimagining it to be like James Brown and the kid asked who James Brown was and she was like ā€œOh my god I canā€™t believe you donā€™t know who James Brown is. Go home and ask your parents, theyā€™ll tell you all about himā€. Even at the time I think all the 14 year olds in the room were like ā€œso this is pretty fucked upā€. I remember going home and telling my dad and he accused me of having made it up because he couldnā€™t believe somebody would do that.

#74

:weary:
:laughing:
purely in terms of my own enjoyment, this is easily the best thread Iā€™ve ever started

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#75

RE racial profiling

there was a german girl in our primary school and she was made to play a part where she walked on and loudly said ā€œlend me your ears!ā€

but she did that then they got the rest of the kids to turn around, bend over and show their bums cos her accent meant it sounded like ā€œlend me your rearsā€

not the worst butā€¦ hmmm

#76

When I was about 11 we did Pirates of Penzance. My mum was the teacher at the school who was always in charge of doing the play, and I auditioned for the lead role. She gave it to Scott Peters, who apparently had a better singing voice than me. Iā€™ve looked him up on Facebook and I donā€™t see any videos of him singing with 60+ likes so fuck knows how that decision was justified.

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#77

I was given the role of the Police Sergeant, which mollified somewhat cos it was still a relatively big part. However I later found out that the reason for this was because I was really short, and they cast all the tallest kids as police officers so it looked funny when we marched about with me at the front.

Excuse me need to go an tag my mum in a comment under one of my facebook videos.

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#78

I think thereā€™s a whole load of school drama teachers who are both very caught up in a fantasy that they are some West End impresario, and also have a real disconnect with like actual society.

I used to go to an after school drama club. I wasnā€™t majorly into acting, it was just something to do and I had lots of friends there. The teacher was pretty weird, and she just had this assumption/fantasy that ALL of us were going to apply to RADA, and she was going to prepare us for auditions, instead of it just being a hobby and that stuff like GCSEs and A-levels were a distraction from the real goal. (She also wouldnā€™t let me help do the lights/sound to learn about it because that was a ā€œboyā€™s jobā€)

She used to tell anecdotes/wisdom about her life, and then years later a friend was reading Stanislavskyā€™s biography, and realised ALL of them were nicked wholesale from that.

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#79

Our school was required to do drama in years 7 and 8. The teacher just could not be arsed with us so usually just made us write plays called either ā€œThe Missionā€ or ā€œThe Stakeoutā€ that sheā€™d never bother marking. Nobody ever continued with it in year 9.

#80

I know teachers are DBS checked etc but goodness thereā€™s still a lot of scope for being a real menace isnā€™t there?!

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#81

My school only did drama as a class in year 7, and again as an option in year 10/11, which seems quite strange. There were school plays though, and the woman who ran the outside drama club I went to used to come round all the local schools and give a talk in assembly to recruit people every now and then.

#82

I wish Iā€™d got involved in secondary school plays, think it could of been my niche, plus a chance to mix with the girls from the girl school I never got to mix with normally

1 Like
#83

typecast as king herod.