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Photo by Andrea Wall

Performing Arts Tutors

Joanne Clark —

It has been wonderful this year to have performing arts experts all working together in the glittering Whare Toi Whakaari. The energy has been amazing and the opportunities for groups to collaborate creatively has been exciting for us all.

Students had opportunities to work with Jacob Rajan from Indian Ink Theatre Company, one of New Zealand’s most successful theatre companies, and with Hannah Wheeler, a graduate of the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art (NASDA - Bachelor in Performing Arts) and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, New York (Music Theatre Intensive). The Excel Theatre Company performed a very exciting lunchtime concert and ran drama and music workshops for Performing Arts students.

Mrs Katie Beer has been the music teacher at Hornby High School since 2008. Her passion is musical theatre, performing in musicals since she was 7 years old. She is a trained singer and pianist. She studied music, theatre studies and dance at university.

This year she began performing with Showbiz Christchurch where she appeared in the New Zealand premier of Wicked and most recently performed in Les Miserables.

Mrs Joanne Clark, drama teacher at Hornby High School has worked on many arts evenings, musicals and Shakespeare festivals here, since 2000. She teaches Drama, Classics and English, anything that is about reading, writing and performing. She has a Master of Arts from the University of Canterbury and an LTCL (Licentiate in Speech and Drama from Trinity College, London). Currently she belongs to a physical theatre group, Zen Zen Zo, Christchurch.

Ms Richardson is the craziest and possibly loudest teacher in whatever room she walks into. This year she teaches Music, English and senior Classical Studies. She has been performing more years than she cares to count and has been in formal singing training since age 10. Her most recent theatre performance was in 2017 in MUSOC's production of RENT.

Mr Luke Taylor has been a drama and English teacher at Hornby High School since the beginning of 2018. He has performed in a few musicals over the years (though not for a while!) and has dabbled in some voice acting, stand-up comedy, and live improvisation. His area of expertise is the voice. If you want to learn to project your voice, put on an accent, or improve your pace and tone, he's the man to see!

We are very lucky to have 5 extremely talented music itinerants at Hornby:

Barbara Mulholland - voice

Marie Gutsell - piano

Tim Sellars - drum

Mike Fudakowski - bass

Ray McMurdo - guitar

Neville Forsythe - piano and woodwind.

They have had another enjoyable year teaching our musicians and we have seen a huge increase in senior musicians gaining Merit and Excellence in their performance standards.

Tim would like to applaud the hard work and fine results of students at Hornby High School. In particular, Lachlan Hickford and Isaac Frank have been making positive steps on the drum kit. Lachlan (who is also a talented guitarist) is building the fundamental skills at a quick rate and is aiming to do drums for his second instrument standard for year 12 next year. Isaac (year 10) is extremely keen and comes back to lessons every week having worked on the necessary material. He will be a great addition to the year 11 music class next year. Both of these students are learning a variety of grooves, learning to read music, and getting to put these skills in a band setting which is very positive.