The Process, Rehearsals and Performance – Malta Visual and Performing Arts School

The performance was built by the students and the teachers worked only on providing the students with the necessary opportunities to know better the story and the places where it all happened. The teachers of Music, Dance and Drama worked as planned and as described in the conceptual model: Presentation Driven Model. It all started by asking students to choose a historic character and everybody had to tell a brief history on the character chosen. From there Toni Bajada was chosen and students started doing research on the character. Historians were brought to lecture students on the character chosen and to inform them on what one can find written about the character and what is the legend behind the character. This led to organize outings to the places where the story took place, and students did some workshops on sites to get a better feel and understanding of the character and the life it led. Once the main character and the other characters were outlined, the students were given the task to work on different scenes they thought should be part of the performance. Later, students used their classmates to build up the scenes they worked upon and slowly the performance started to take shape. Music and Dance Teachers and students were later included, and a discussion was nurtured where students put in their ideas on where the different music and dance pieces were to be included. The performance than took shape and students themselves worked on fine tuning everybody’s performance, worked on props, set and costumes. Once the performance took shape, a multiplier event was held for the parents and a brief discussion on the performance between parents and students helped in better shaping the performance. Finally, a post-mortem was done to focus on what worked and what could have been done better for future reference.