Gothic Season
Gothic Season is a literary festival currently taking place at King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys in Birmingham, a three week celebration of all things mysterious, sinister and spooky. The Gothic genre is a perennial favourite of writers, an area of creativity and imagination which draws readers and movie goers into dark tales of the supernatural, intrigue and murder, adventures which make us unable to put a Gothic story book down, or keeps us on the edges of our seats at the cinema. During Gothic Season students are being offered a host of opportunities to discover for themselves why Gothic is so gripping, suspenseful and entertaining, through activities in lessons, in tutor time and outside of school hours.
Partnership organisations offering expertise in Gothic studies and performance, have been joining the school every week to share their knowledge and insight, including academics from The Centre for the History of the Gothic at Sheffield University, who have been leading students in interactive sessions on different aspects of Gothic literature. Two dramatisations of classic Gothic tales, A Christmas Carol and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, will be performed for our student audiences, and Gothic Film Club has offered everyone the opportunity to experience how Gothic tales have been transferred to the cinema screen in modern spellbinding retellings of the stories.
A cross –school challenge, Strictly Talk Gothic, is also currently underway, a speech competition which aims to find the student at HGS who can best deliver a Gothic speech with dramatic energy and skill. What is on offer to students is an experience centuries in the making, where they can encounter an array of characters created by some of the greatest literary imaginations of all time.
‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious’, wrote Albert Einstein, and these are intriguing words students are able to explore during their time at King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys, not least during these three weeks of Gothic Season.