Arts Prefects - Term 1 Report
Hello! We are the 2022 Arts Prefects - Stella and Lily. We’ve had an awesome start to the year and we’re so excited for all the creativity that 2022 will bring. This year, we’re hoping to foster a school-wide love and appreciation for the arts, with initiatives for everyone to enjoy. We’re also hoping to showcase St Hilda’s incredible arts facilities, and bring more student art to the school corridors!
I’m a day girl, and I came to St Hilda’s in Year 9. I’m taking Painting, Photography, Drama, Digi, and Media Studies. I’ve been involved in the Arts and Painting since I came to St Hilda’s, and last year won the Hunia Dean award for Painting and Photography. This year I’m looking forward to working with Stella to find new and innovative ways to celebrate the arts in our school community.
I’m also a day girl, and came to St Hilda’s in Year 8. I take Painting, History, Media Studies, DVC, and English. Throughout my time here I have been a part of the hip-hop and aerobics community, coaching and participating, and I was in the school musical Footloose last year, which was great fun! This year I’m looking forward to working with Lily and helping showcase and appreciate the beautiful art that happens at our school.
Term 1
1. Assembly arts Items
We have been enjoying featuring student arts items in assembly each week, and finding new ways to present these. One of the challenges we’ve faced is that we can no longer have live singing, wind instruments, or mask-less dancing in assemblies, due to Covid restrictions. Instead, we’re pre-recording videos to show in assemblies, and branching out to other artistic performances, like a live student poetry performance. With this video format we’re finding we can showcase other areas of the Arts as well, so we’ve filmed interviews with painting and photography students, which will be presented in assemblies. This is a good way to keep the school engaged with what’s happening in the Arts.
We know that with the Chapel redevelopments, assemblies will be held in the Drama theatre next term, so we’re really looking forward to featuring more dancers, and bigger musical items like student bands. This works especially well in the theatre, and we will involve students who work with the colourful stage lights.
We’re looking to find a way to collate these Arts Items videos online to keep a record for our performers, students, and wider school community.
Chalk Art
We held a Chalk Art Competition which took place in the upper quad around the middle of Term 1. This initiative was in response to Mrs Barron’s suggestion we organise lunchtime activities, as some students are finding lunchtimes quite empty with cancelled sports practices. This was a really positive experience with lots of students giving it a go - so much so that we went through two full cartons of chalk! It was lovely to see the junior students especially getting involved with this. We filmed the Chalk Art Competition and featured some student interviews and photos in a Prefects Update to the school in a student assembly. Winners were awarded chocolate and art materials.
3. Artist of the Term
Well done to the Blue Gypsies, who are our Term 1 Artist of the Term!
We have filmed a video with junior band The Blue Gypsies, which was shown in Arts Assembly. The Blue Gypsies competed in Bandquest last year, and lead singer Olivia Bezett jointly won the best vocalist award with a student from John McGlashan. We’re very proud of their hard work!
The Artist of the Term initiative was established in previous years and we think it’s really important to continue with this, especially to feature younger students on the school stage, and encourage their participation in the Arts.
4. School Fun Days
As a Prefect team, one of our goals is to ‘find the happiness in the little things’. So far we’ve organised three school fun days as a team. Valentine's day was a huge success with the archway set-up with ribbons, chocolates and music, and ‘warm fuzzies’, with the Year 13s wearing pink or red. We celebrated International Women Day, where the Prefect team put together a ‘Break the Bias’ video with messages from inspirational New Zealand women, and we dressed as an inspirational women or career or in IWD colours. We also celebrated a Pride day for Dunedin Pride Month. For Arts involvement we made colouring pages for Pride, and printed International Women’s Day colouring pages to the whanau groups for a friendly art competition (The winning whanau was shouted a pizza lunch!).
Lily has been taking the photos for all Prefect fun days, so we have an official record of our initiatives, which are posted to Instagram and Facebook by Isla. Stella is also working on making SHCS TikToks. As such, we have an increased awareness of the school social media presence and are making an effort to keep video and photo records of all Arts things going on. (For example Stella filmed a short video of the chalk art and made an Instagram story, to keep the community updated about the art students are getting up to).
At the moment it’s hard to plan a full fun day with the big unknowns around Covid, which is why we’ve been doing many little celebrations instead of big events.
Our Prefect Initiatives for 2022:
1. Student art in the corridors
We love sharing what’s created down in the Arts building with the rest of the school! One way we’re planning to do this is to have student art put up in the school's corridors. We are yet to finalise spaces for these, but have a couple of students' art in mind of what to put up! This would add more colour to the school as well as show appreciation for the skill of our artists.
2. Showcasing the Arts building
We have been collecting footage from each of the subjects in the Arts building (painting, photography, dance and drama, as well as behind-the-scenes tech - lights, costumes, etc.) and plan to present this in a Prefect video in student assembly. We think it’s really important to showcase the students who use these facilities, like photography students working the lights and organising a photoshoot, or dance students in the dance studio, as the Arts building is such an awesome environment loved by everyone involved in the Arts.
Sometime this year, these video/s will be shared on the SHCS social media to show our community what goes on in the Arts building.
3. Window art and chalk art competitions
We’ve already held one of these and found it was a really rewarding event, so we will definitely be continuing with this initiative. Next term we’ll be doing window chalk art, as it lasts longer than chalk art in rainy Dunedin weather!
4. Photography competition
This initiative is one that works really well even if students are at home/ isolating (although we’re crossing our fingers we’re through the worst of it!). This is also something we as Arts Prefects can run remotely very easily. With or without another Covid isolation, we will be running a photography competition this year - watch this space!
5. House singing
This is an important tradition that brings the Arts to the Mumford Cup. We don’t know what this’ll look like this year as we’re not allowed to have singing as of right now, but as soon as Covid restrictions lift we’ll be working with the House Leaders and the Arts team to get this started. We’re optimistic we’ll be allowed to sing in groups again very soon, and if not, we’ll think outside the box for Arts involvement - a House Lipsync, perhaps?!