The Extraordinary Workshop

Step into the world of professional theatre — without leaving your school.

For 90 minutes, your Year 5/6 class becomes a theatre company — and Jon Bode directs them the way professionals are directed. Real constraints, real deadlines, real audience. By the end of the session they have built and performed two original works: an ensemble physical theatre piece and a scene study performed script-free from six lines on a screen. Every student performs twice.

What happens in the room

It opens with thirty seconds of full operatic voice, no warning. Then bodies: ensemble movement built from professional physical theatre practice. Then the students watch their own work back on the big screen, the way professional companies review rehearsal footage. Then a scene: six lines, a written pause, and the discovery that the same words can become fifteen entirely different plays. It closes with a performance — theirs.

The details

Format: 90 minutes, one class (25–32 students), Years 5–6.

Space: hall, gym or open classroom. No stage, no chairs, no set-up. Equipment: a speaker and a screen.

Cost: $650 + GST per session. Multi-session and whole-year-level rates available.

Staff debrief add-on: 45 minutes after school — the structures and coaching language behind the session, handed over for classroom use. $250 + GST.

Compliance: VIT registered. Fully insured.

Who leads it

Jon Bode is a rare combination: a professional theatre-maker who is also a working teacher. Thirty years making and performing theatre — Melbourne Theatre Company, the Australian Shakespeare Company, Patch Theatre Company, musical theatre and opera on stages across Australia, Europe, Asia and the USA, including Opera Australia and its national schools tours. He is a VIT-registered Performing Arts specialist currently teaching in three Victorian primary schools. This isn’t a visitor’s routine; it’s a working classroom practice built from a professional career, and it runs on a wet Tuesday in a school hall exactly as written.