DP1 Play Backdrop

Student Name	Yasmyn Ntege
Activity Name / Description	DP1 Play
Location	In School
Was it C, A, S or a combination?	CREATIVITY
Hours of CAS	10+ Hours

The DP1 play was a whole year group collaborative activity in which we were expected to divide into areas of interest and work together to contribute something to the end creation of the play. As part of the stage crew, I worked as the driving force in creating a suitable stage backdrop for the play. Organizing for materials, measuring and finally painting, took a lot of my time but the end product was worth it.

One thing I learnt in the creation of the backdrop was to not underestimate the potential time needed to put into major art pieces. I really procrastinated and put it off with the mind-set of it being simple to start and finish. It ended up taking up a lot of my free time, which it wouldn’t have otherwise done had I begun earlier. I started actually working on it, the week before the play and so everyone involved in the painting was slightly stressed. Another problem that rose was that the paint we had been provided with, lacked variety in a sense that we could not be as artistic as we would’ve wanted to be as we were limited by the paint available. A consequence of this was we had to request for Ms. Regina, the art teacher to provide us with help. She was in her right to decline but he was nice enough to mentor us in this process and supply us with a bit of paint when needed.

I enjoyed working with the group of people involved, it was a fun way to get to know and interact with more people in my grade. We worked some times after school and every weeknight prior to the actual play which was quite stressful but fun. It was in these situations that you get to learn about someone a bit more. I had an increased awareness of my strength in that, I was able to direct the artistry and draft the actual background by myself. I also bettered my skills at painting large-scale surfaces. Although there were times when I got bored or tired, I was able to persevere and stay on track even though the incentive to get sidetracked was strong, as we had no supervisor.

We were very mindful over the resources we had available to us, even though we had a lot to work with, we decided against being wasteful. This shows our ethical considerations and choices in the clearest view. We also were mindful of where we worked however, it would have been more ethically considerate if we had place newspapers underneath our workspace. Unfortunately that thought only came to us after there were paint marks on the ground and so we will keep that in mind to advise the next DP1 group.

I was able to develop my leadership skills through working collaboratively with others and respecting everyone’s ideas and thoughts. I also took the responsibility of drafting both a rough and an accurate sketch for the piece in order for the painting to take place with the end in mind. This made working on the piece in general, pleasurable and efficient.

SUPERVISOR: Mr. Alex Mwololo