Transition Year Drama, Dance And Art Module with the Cope Foundation.

Every Tuesday and Thursday for nine weeks, Transition Year students took part in drama, dance and art classes with the Cope Foundation. At the end of the nine weeks, they put on a show, ‘Grease Cork Style’.

The drama group began their work by creating small sketches and images as well as playing some drama games. They had a great time improvising some small scenes in groups and had fun playing around with it. They then looked at the script for Grease Cork Style and held auditions for the parts. There were many parts up for grabs; Sandy, Danny, Ms Lynch, Eugene, the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds. The part of Sandy went to Aoife Collins and Eve Mullins and the part of Danny to Ben Quinlan and Mark Callahan. Sandy had to speak in a Dublin accent and all the rest in Cork accents. Both Danny and Sandy also had to sing. The drama group then amalgamated with the dance group for rehearsals. They had lots of fun making the piece enjoyable for the audience and some budding actors emerged from the weeks of rehearsals. A huge thank you to Paul Sherlock and Martina Mulqueen, who were taught the drama classes.

The dance group performed dances to ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’, ‘Grease Lightening’ and ‘We go Together.’ Ava Moynihan and Aoibh Gavin were both given solo dances in Hopelessly Devoted to You. Also given a solo was Sarah Kate Sweeney who sang ‘Beauty School Dropout.’ They got active in every class, with a vigorous warm up. Everyone gave a great performance and practised their dances frequently. It was many of the dancers first times dancing and some of them even decided to continue dancing after the play! The dances were choreographed beautifully and everyone did a great job. A huge thank you Tracey O’Donovan Linnane who taught the dance classes.

The art group made some masterpieces during their nine weeks. During this module, the TY students and the Cope clients worked on some team artwork pieces, including two totem poles and four large paintings. To create the totem poles, each student created their own clay head which was modelled, bisque fired, painted, glaze fired and then assembled to create two 9ft totem poles. The four large paintings were based on the colourful work of Austrian born artist and environmentalist, Hundertwasser. His unique and colourful images were enlarged and embellished and will now be displayed in the halls of our school as testament to the creative minds and collaborative skills of our friends from the Cope Foundation and the TY class of 2017/18. A huge thank you to Ms. Dorney and Ms. O’Leary who taught the art classes.

They all really enjoyed partaking in the workshops with Cope and can definitely say that what they have learned will stand to them in the future. They found the classes very enjoyable and made some great friends with the people from Cope that joined them. Everyone was so friendly and really got stuck into the work they were doing, whether it be drama, dance or art. They can say without doubt that if given the chance, they would all do this classes again.

Well done to all involved!