Extracurricular Activities Main Headline

IFT Drama Club tunes up to stage a musical

IFT Drama Club members
中文摘要 / Summary in Chinese

The IFT Drama Club, in collaboration with the IFT Chamber Music Club and the Macao Ensemble Association, will stage a musical on 4 August. The production will be held at the most prestigious venue for performances in the city, the Macao Cultural Centre.

The 60-minute musical called “Be Your Own Heroes”, sets out to deal with intergenerational relations in families, and to inculcate self-confidence in young people. The Macao Foundation is supporting the production.

IFT Drama Club President Qi Xiaotong says: “We are working together with the Chamber Music Club on this musical, to contribute to society.” He is a Year 3 student taking the IFT programme leading to a bachelor’s degree in Hotel Management.

Xiaotong says collaboration by specialist clubs for students at IFT allows each club to expand the scope of its activities. “If each club works alone, it may require too much effort with no corresponding effect,” he says.

The IFT Drama Club regularly gets together with drama troupes at other institutions of higher education. This year the club took part in the annual University Students Drama Festival, which gathered together drama groups at tertiary institutions in Macao, Hong Kong, and the Mainland Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou and Xiamen. The IFT Drama Club and the Drama Society of the University of Macau Students Union jointly arranged the event.

The 2019 festival was the sixth. The IFT Drama Club has taken part in all of them.

“Before, we had only drama clubs at universities in Macao, Hong Kong and Shenzhen taking part,” Xiaotong says. “Starting this year, we are trying to include more universities in the Greater Bay Area. This may prompt more exchanges in the field of drama.”

This year the IFT Drama Club will also take part for the first time in the annual Macao Colleges Drama Performance. The event comprises contributory performances by the drama clubs at several institutions of higher education in Macao.

Experience enriched

The IFT Drama Club is an affiliate of the IFT Student Union. There are many other affiliates, including the Culinary Club, Heritage Club and Diving Club.

Membership of a club is an easy way for students to get more out of their time at IFT, whether they hope to make new friends, to try something new or to keep indulging their personal interests. Specialist clubs allow students to take part in a wide range of activities outside the classroom, ranging from sports to voluntary work in the community.

The management of IFT says they encourage students to involve themselves in extracurricular activities. The purpose is to expand the horizons of students, introduce them to new people and build up their self-confidence, so enriching their experience of academic life at the Institute.

The IFT Drama Club was established in 2006 and since then it has staged many plays. The club attracts about 60 to 70 members each year. The members not only act, but they also write scripts and direct.

Xiaotong says staging plays can be a fun way for IFT students from Mainland China to improve their proficiency in Cantonese, because most of the plays are performed in the Macao dialect.

“Coming from Mainland China, we may be unable to understand Cantonese well,” Xiaotong says, “so we try to learn and understand the language.”