Nearing the end of the year, the class of 2026 hosted the Illumin8 festival, an even in which we all showed everyone who has supported us through our transition journey how far we have come, and moving on into senior school. During this time, we were working on our project X performance, which we then showed to everyone who helped us with the performance.
Our performance was shadow puppetry. Shadow puppetry is a form of drama which involves casting a light onto a fabric screen and casting shadows onto a screen with paper, cardboard, wood, or even your own hands!
We also had to choose a story for our performance from a book. our group chose The Goose Girl, which is a story about St Peter, who wants to be god, just for one afternoon. God grants him his wish, and so he carries on being god all night. At one point he finds a flock of geese, but as god he has to take care of them all night instead of going to the feast.
The production of the festival was overall enjoyable, as I got to work on something I love doing while collaborating with friends. We pulled off a pretty spectacular show, and I do believe everybody watching felt like their time was well spent. We had a few problems, such as Regan and Andrew having a few problems showing up to the performance. These and other problems were easily solved with some reasoning. To do better next time, I would make sure to know what each group member was doing. Communication was necessary, and there were a lot of ides that were cut, but we all worked it out in the end.
In terms of organisation, we had a few mishaps, but we quickly cleaned them up with some critical thinking, which is analysing, identifying and observing facts to identify a situation. An example of how this was displayed in the show was how we had to figure out how to multitask, because we had to focus on speaking and acting, so we solved this by pre-recording all of our lines. This meant we could just focus on the acting and overall produce a better output.
When we showed our performance to the public, I didn’t feel confident. But as we did it, I ignored the faults and focused on the ERIC values and tried to do the best I could do. At the end, I felt confident again. I had reassured myself about the situation.