On 15 September 2013, students from LASALLE’s Acting and Technical & Production Management Programmes spent an unforgettable week at the Asia Pacific Bureau (APB) Theatre Schools Festival 2013. The event hosted more than 15 schools from 10 countries in this year’s Festival in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Established in 2009, the festival aims to foster collaboration, build professional connections and encourage sharing of knowledge and experience among theatre schools in the Asia-Pacific.
LASALLE has been participating in this festival annually since 2010 to give students greater exposure to diverse theatre practices as well as the rare opportunity to work with other theatre students and professionals from all over the region.
The team from LASALLE was led by Senior Fellow and APB Advisory Board Member, Prof Aubrey Mellor, who said, “Asia-Pacific theatre schools have really come of age in the past eight years since the establishment of APB, and LASALLE’s presence has always been highly regarded in the Festival. This was a special year for us because for the first time, the entire cohort of Level 2 BA(Hons) Acting students came along.”
The Acting students performed Pao Kun and the Dreamtime, a contemporary piece devised specifically for the Festival, while the Technical & Production Management class single-handedly managed all the production-related needs of participating schools’ performances, as well as for the opening and closing ceremony.
“The students got a tremendous amount out of their time in Vietnam,” said lecturer Toby Papazoglou, who led the technical team in Vietnam. “It was a rare challenge for the Diploma students to have an event of this scale to work on, and they really stepped up to it. They gained self-confidence, learned a lot about the reality of being stage managers and earned the respect of everyone else there,” he added.
Working on two shows a day was a daunting prospect initially for student Sheryl Woo, who said, “It was a huge responsibility. We were representing Singapore as well as LASALLE, and they didn’t have a lot of technical equipment there. We also had to work around language barriers, which really improved our communication skills. It was a real eye-opener.”
After the Festival, Pao Kun and the Dreamtime was also staged for Singapore audiences on campus. LASALLE was then invited by United World College (UWC) of South East Asia to perform the play at the International Schools Theatre Association and Theatre Arts Programme Symposium.
