The Year 12 ATAR Drama class and Mrs Leadon worked very hard to rehearse and create a wonderful performance of Eyes to the Floor by Alana Valentine.
When girls at the Parramatta Training School rioted in 1961, a special, more punitive institution was set up in a disused psychiatric hospital in Hay, in remote Western NSW.
Redesigned to house the ten ‘worst’ girls in the State, the Hay Institution for Girls became both a threat to maintain order in Parramatta and a site of further degradation and psychological torment for the young women it housed.
Forced to constantly keep their ‘eyes to the floor’, these girls were not allowed to speak to each other and were forced to lay and then break up concrete paths, scrub paint from walls and tend the institution’s garden.
Eyes to the Floor, was a moving portrait of hope that survives even in the worst of conditions.
Written especially for a young cast, whose ages are chillingly equivalent to the incarcerated girls they are portraying, this was young adult theatre about the triumph of the imagination. The students, parents and teachers that watched the performance were certainly moved by the seriousness of the content. They were also extremely impressed by the mature and sensitive character portrayal by these wonderful students.
Congratulations to the cast!
Written by Emma Leadon, Drama Teacher