Conference of the Birds - Mt Barker Waldorf School, S.A.

Mt Barker is a Waldorf or Rudolf Steiner Independent school in South Australia. The school is K - 12 and has about 320 students.
Each Class 12 at Mt Barker, as a gift to their community, prepares and performs a play. After a season of 4 nights the students clean up and then disperse, after a final camp together. The class of 2007 decided to perform their play four times at an amphitheatre in Mt Barker and then a further 11 times in a variety of venues in India.
From December 2007 to end January 2008 Mt Barker Waldorf school grad. students toured the Conference of the Birds (Brooke and Carriere), based on the 9th Century Sufi poem, through India - from the delta of the Godavari River to Pondicherry, across to ancient Hampi and Goa. The 38 people then headed north to Mumbai and the Zoroastrian centre of Udwada, then south to Bangalore, where we gave three performances before travelling to Chennai and finally north again to Hyderabad, one of the centres of Waldorf education in India. There were 11 performances in all, in fishing villages and plush theatres, to audiences from 250 up to 3000, sometimes to audiences that couldn’t speak a jot of English.
Peter Glasby

Originally published in the November / December 2008 edition of Stage Whispers