The Tempest: looking ahead to this term's major production

This term's dramatic highlight will be a d'Overbroeck's College production of the Tempest. Shakespeare's last play – a dark, brooding comedy about power, cruelty, love and magic – has been relocated to a technological junk heap in the middle of the Pacific. On this pile of discarded motherboards, monitors and technological detritus sits Prospera, usurped Duchess of Milan, and her daughter Miranda.

Caliban, their slave, the man who built the island with his mother Sycorax, plots his revenge on Prospera, while Prospera herself spies her former enemies on a passing ship. Summoning a storm with her sprite Ariel, the ship is wrecked on the shore of the island and its occupants scattered. As they all try to make sense of their new situation, they realise the island is not what it seems and that someone is controlling their every move.

A thought-provoking and visceral new interpretation of a complex and fascinating play, students from across the d'Overbroeck's family combine video, physical theatre, a cutting-edge soundtrack and exciting visual effects to bring you Shakespeare like you've never seen it before. Intense, energetic, funny and tragic by turn, this promises to be a spectacular theatrical event.

Thursday 1 & Friday 2 July, 7pm
Leckford Place Hall
Tickets £10 (adult), £6 (student/concession)

To book your tickets, please contact the Leckford Place Office: 01865 302620 / leckfordplace@doverbroecks.com

Photographs from our Artweeks Exhibition

As well as sponsoring the Oxfordshire Artweeks festival, we also – of course – host our own exhibition, which was open over the weekend. As those of you who came along will attest, there was a fantastic array of work: everything from intricately detailed miniatures to gigantic cardboard sculpture; oils to watercolours; sketching to photography.

Here's a slideshow of photos taken at the Private View of our exhibition, on the evening of Friday 14 May.

Election 2010 - a d'Overbroeck's perspective

For a Friday afternoon news post, we thought we'd bring you a short video on the 2010 election (and our own accompanying mock election, the results of which are shown above).

In the video, Head of Politics Andrew Colclough discusses a few of the issues with sixth form Politics students and gives his own perspective.



(Watch the video on Vimeo.com)

Artweeks Art from a d'Overbroeck's Parent

Yesterday we visited Kevin Wooding, who is the father of d'Overbroeck's student Lucy Arque, currently in Year 9 at Leckford Place. Kevin is exhibiting a selection of his art as part of the Oxfordshire Artweeks festival – currently in full swing.

[On which note, a quick reminder that our own exhibition – featuring work by students, parents and staff of the College, as well as local artists – will be open this weekend. Please do come along! More details here (pdf)]

During Artweeks, many Oxfordshire artists throw open their studios, galleries and homes to the public. In this spirit, we pitched up at Kevin's exhibition, video camera in hand, to find out a little bit about his art. To find out more, watch the interview:



If you'd like to see Kevin's work in the flesh, the opening hours for his exhibition are on the Artweeks website. Alternatively, send Kevin an email to book a viewing.

Singing to our neighbours

Not long ago, five members of the sixth form vocal group performed at Farfields Residential Home – which is next-door to The Swan Building on the Banbury Road. Students included Gidon Fineman, Samuel Barrett, Emiko Yukawa, Min Jia Pan, and Matt Thorns.

The recital kicked off with a performance of 'Takwaba' – a Zambian piece, learnt during the college trip to Zambia in 2009 and arranged by Gidon Fineman, before going on to perform a succession of songs such as 'Hallelujah', 'Fields of Gold', 'Dream a little Dream', and 'Seasons of Love' from the musical Rent.

Matt Thorns then finished the concert with a solo performance of his own composition (written as part of his A level Music course).

It was a great opportunity to build a connection with the Fairfields residents, and we look forward to similar performances in future.

The new d'Overbroeck's ad campaign: how it was made

Normally we use this news feed to talk about student stories or College events. This post, though, is a little different: we thought we'd give you an insight into our Sixth Form advertising – by telling you the story of how we came up with our new ad campaign, which we launched earlier this month.


The thinking behind the ads

We wanted a series of adverts that reflected the opinions of students at the College; a campaign that wasn't us talking about ourselves, but us in the eyes of our students. It was to be eyecatching and bold, with a simple message about a distinctive feature of d'Overbroeck's Sixth Form.


Asking our students for help

So the first step was to ask a group of sixth formers to give up a few hours of their Easter holiday and come in for an informal focus group.

These generous students – Charlie, Daisy, Dani, Samuel and Will – gave us a wealth of feedback and ideas. As we talked, certain themes kept coming up. Independence. Balance. Atmosphere. Trust.

We kept coming back to the idea that, at Sixth Form, these students wanted a place that was geared towards them. A place where, as somebody said, 'It's not about what you can do for the school, it's about what the school can do for you.'

This idea seemed to be at the root of many of the qualities that our group liked about d'Overbroeck's.

... And we decided that this should therefore be the focus of our adverts.




Putting the ads together

Before our focus group had dispersed, we'd taken a few photographs of each student. We then paired up some of these with headline quotations taken from the focus group session and fitting in with our overarching theme. In our ears rang the advice of copywriter Roger Holdsworth, whose daughter Annabel studied here a few years ago: no more than 5-10 words for the headline. (Roger has had an illustrious copywriting career working for prestigious advertising agencies such as M&C Saatchi.)

At length (after a fair amount of headscratching, numerous false starts and plenty of ruthless word-pruning) we ended up with our first set of three adverts, featuring Samuel, Dani and Charlie – which are currently on display at a number of poster sites around Oxford, and have also appeared in the Oxford Times.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the campaign!