The SmARTs program is an acting program run by The Smith Family each year. It went for four days in the Performing Arts Centre and was run by two wonderful people, the co-founders and co-artistic directors of IO Theatrical in Launceston, Grace Roberts and Chris Jackson. They taught us many things throughout the week, like vocal projection and how to become your character. Each morning, we started with a check in to see how everyone was feeling out of 10, but we didn’t need to give any explanation to the number. If your number was low, Grace and Chris made it a goal to get that number up. These check ins helped to make us feel comfortable in the program. Then we did body, vocal and mind warmups. Throughout the day we learned a lot by getting involved and doing practical activities. They taught us how to become more like our chosen characters with voice and movement; asking how the character would feel and think. At one point they showed us a video of a performance that they did, and Grace performed a monologue for us so there was some in person acting involved. Grace and Chirs emphasised fun in acting and the understanding that they were not going to ask us to do anything they weren’t willing to do. They put us in groups, duos or on our own and gave us a script to learn and perform by the end of the week. They talked to us about annotating the script properly, stage directions, and other ways to memorise a script, but didn’t expect us to do all of it in one week. By the end of the week, we all performed the scenes we learned but put in order, so it was more like a show, and we got to use props and costumes to add to the scenes we learnt. Overall, it was a wonderful experience and I would recommend other students to try out the SmARTS program next year!

–Nevaeh, Year 10