The ISTA Journey

ISTA or (International Schools Theatre Association), is an event which our school participates in each year for about a week. Due to Covid, we have had to find new ways to adapt to the changes of being quarantined at home, this included participating in ISTA online. ISTA has been a great event to participate with students from around the world, which is why I was quite disappointed to learn that this year ISTA only consisted of our class (this was due to the various time schedules so the people running ISTA did the events at different days for the different schools).

For this year, ISTA consisted of a three-day workshop where we got to meet various theatre teachers who taught us about many different forms of theatre and how we can improve our director’s notebook. The director notebook is crucial for us, as that is how we record our thoughts and planning and is how we are graded other than performance. Some of the various theatre performances and directors we learned about were Japanese puppetry, realism, Stanislavski, and many more. Like many other ISTA’s there were lots of team-building exercises which we participated in, although the communication from zoom led to it being much more difficult to have full conversations.

This experience allowed me to explore many of my own interests while also teaching me about various other styles of theatre. This helped me find new ways to implement various techniques into my own performances to try and captivate the audience more.

During ISTA the two main learning outcomes which I got out of this event were working collaboratively (LO4)with others and showing perseverance and commitment (LO5). The reason I say this is because we had to be willing to sacrifice our weekend for ISTA during the week in which our class had many summatives and tests. We had the choice of leaving ISTA early however we all chose to persevere and learn from ISTA.