As a drama teacher, it’s always sobering to read that the number of students taking the subject at A level and GCSE is falling. This year, A-level drama was down 5.8 per cent, while GCSE numbers fell by 0.8 per cent. The popularity of the arts seems to be waning year on year, leading some to sound the alarm about an “arts apocalypse”.

Why should we care? Because the arts are more than entertainment.

They play a key role in teaching our young people the value of dedication, rehearsal, practise and honing one’s craft. And, they play an invaluable role in exposing our teenagers to other cultures.

Students are ‘very accepting of different art forms’

Italian Commedia dell’arte. Japanese Noh. Spanish flamenco. If we expect our students to be able to use a wide range of physical and vocal performance techniques (as every drama GCSE and A-level syllabus does), it seems foolish to ignore the wide and varied examples that exist in the world around us.

Naturally, when you first ask Year 7 students to channel their inner mime, there is a general smatter of giggling. But after the initial amusement, in general, they are very accepting of different art forms. Students love to master a skill and world theatre is no different. Crucially, most of these theatre forms stem from a historical desire to worship and celebrate. In essence, isn’t that what all drama is?

I can recommend Rina Orellana Flamenco’s extensive dance tutorials on flamenco to encourage students to think about movement precision, but more than that, to start conversations on how dance/theatre can be used to communicate an ancient history. Why did this form of story-telling theatre survive when there was no means of writing down tales? What is it that these dancers felt compelled to tell us? Students quickly recognise that movement is universal, you don’t need to speak the same language as anyone else to communicate.

Similarly, this short extract of Japanese story-telling Rakugo translated into English is a masterclass in narration, musical accompaniment and expressive movement. When you have no scientific means of understanding the world, how do humans make sense of the world around them? Year 7 dramaturgists will tell you that every phenomenon - every sunrise, every antelope migration - is much easier to understand if there is a backstory. We have had conversations about how whilst the Ancient Greeks made sense of the world through the tragedies that played out in the amphitheatres, Japanese culture addressed moral issues raised in Buddhist preachings through Rakugo.  We explore the human desire to explain the unexplainable.

Meaningful discussion on ‘what joins and divides us’

If you have room in your lesson plans for students to read extracts of Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega. When a ferocious military commander is killed, the inhabitants of a Spanish village are tortured for a confession. The joint cry of “Fuenteovejuna did it”, a cry led by the women of the village, is a momentous moment of community solidarity.

Explorations of this play in my classroom have created production concepts that link civil unrest to the UK in 2024, such as the Southport riots. Young people are well attuned to what can divide us, and the drama studio is the perfect location to express those concerns.

Likewise, Translations by Brian Friel offers a fascinating post-colonial insight into the treatment of Irish villagers at the hands of the British. It offers an excellent opportunity for our students to contemplate what it means to honour the language and traditions of a country, and at what cost. In our discussions, my young drama students have demonstrated a real maturity to these colonialist discussions, linking the events of Translations to what they have seen in the media around the UK’s staggered release of artefacts belonging to other countries. 

In our discussions around colonialism, my young drama students have demonstrated a real maturity, linking the events of the play to what they have seen in the media around the UK’s staggered release of artefacts belonging to other countries. They are ready to question the total authority of British invaders, and channel this into thoughtful reinterpretations of “the white man” in performances of the play.

Unfamiliar customs and traditions can strengthen our own craft. The performance style of another country can be different, strange even, but beautiful - and ripe with ideas that can be magpie-ed for our own performance ends. If that does not celebrate the diversity of the world around us, I don’t know what can.

Hetty Steele works at Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton