The Royal Shakespeare Company Artist Residency 2022

At Dulwich, collaborations and partnerships with external organisations from around the world provide exceptional opportunities for students to learn directly from practitioners in a range of disciplines.

The Royal Shakespeare Company Artist Residency programme is one of these key partnership activities that Dulwich Schools host every year. Pre-Covid, RSC Learning sent their Associate Practitioners to conduct in-person workshops on campus over one week. Currently, Residencies are now hosted in an engaging, student-focused hybrid format combining online and offline elements – ensuring students and teachers are still able to have a direct and immersive experience while following local Covid regulations.

RSC Learning Practitioners planned with DCI teachers to ensure each bespoke workshop met the needs of every school. The residencies enabled our students to understand Shakespeare’s relevance in 2022, explore storytelling through stage design, develop story-devising skills and learn how to perform a soliloquy. This process enabled students to deepen their understanding of English literature as well as drama.

This year, to accompany these enriching and exciting online sessions, RSC Learning arranged a big surprise for each participating school; a Play-in-a-Box suitcase from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown, with fabric samples from the costumes used in the Shakespeare productions and photos of past productions. Not only did this provide wonderful learning materials, but it also inspired the school community to continue to work with Shakespeare in a creative and vivid way.

“Working with RSC Learning has been very encouraging because at Dulwich Zhuhai, we want students to realise that they all have the capacity to create, whether it’s dialogue, storylines or costumes for the characters on stage. They have shown through the workshops that they can be challenged to think out-of-the-box and we all know how important that is in our ever-changing world.” - Ms. Audrey Sim, Head of Drama at Dulwich Zhuhai