By Ms Sally Stenning, Head of Performing Arts

Our key focus in the Performing Arts curriculum at Radford College is to foster service, collaboration and leadership through creative endeavour and play. We are committed to cultivating an inclusive culture where staff and students feel confident taking creative risks and are inspired to pursue excellence.

We value the journey as much as the final product and understand that through the Performing Arts students discover and develop a clearer understanding not only of what they can do, but more crucially who they can be. Through Music, Dance, Drama, and Technical Theatre, students are safe to hone their unique talents and use these gifts for the betterment of others.

A key focus in our classrooms is fostering strong links with Service Learning. In Music and Dance, students regularly visit the Calvary Haydon Retirement Community, using performance as a vehicle for compassion and community engagement. Students in Drama create and share work for and in collaboration with our Junior School students as a means to deepen their engagement and understanding of key units of inquiry. Moving forward, we are keen to build on these wonderful opportunities as they provide rich learning and deep connections and understanding across our community.

We promote collaboration not only through service but also across classroom and co-curricular domains. Recent highlights have included Musical Theatre Evenings, Dance Festival, various productions and our recent Performing Arts Showcase Evening, in which our students shared their work as chorographers, directors and musicians as they delved deeply into units of work with a focus on creativity and innovation.

Our students also have a myriad of opportunities to work alongside professional artists. In the first semester we have worked with music lecturers, dance companies and world class puppeteers to build the knowledge and skills of our students.

Finally, we have a strong commitment to building the leadership capacity in our students. Our students develop vital 21st-century skills through learning experiences that build communication, collaboration, creative problem solving and adaptability. More specifically, we are implementing projects that enable our senior students to take on leadership roles in directing, designing, choreographing and composing works for their junior counterparts. The upcoming Years 7 and 8 Production ‘Grimm’s Tales’ is one example of such a collaboration.

We are blessed to work with such wonderful students. We extend a warm invitation to the entire community to come and experience the joy of the Performing Arts here at Radford College.