The Bush School divides the Upper School program into fall and spring semesters, and two three-week Cascades terms occur at the end of each semester. The winter Cascades term runs the first three weeks in January, while the spring Cascades term runs for three weeks in May. During each Cascade, students take a single interdisciplinary course of study, led by interdepartmental teaching teams. These thematic immersive experiences are comprised of students across all grade levels. Cascades are academically engaging, challenging, and require students to grapple with complex problems and face real-life challenges both on and off campus.
Theater Cascades may include:
Embodying Shakespeare's Voice
- This Cascade will be an investigation into the history, the sources, the aesthetics, the contemporary milieu and relevance of William Shakespeare’s plays in a modern context. We will watch plays, do research, and explore a variety of theatrical exercises as we reach into the vibrancy of his language and learn to embody it through acting out various characters in selected scenes.
Interactive Theater for Social Change
- In the Interactive Theater process, students collaborate to write plays based on their own life experiences and then perform these plays for small audiences in an interactive way. In the first iteration of the play, there is a hurtful or oppressive event that is not resolved. Then, audience members are invited to join the performers on stage and re-create the story to produce different outcomes. Instead of talking about how to make change, audience members actively try out different ways of resolving the problem. This takes participants out of their “heads” and into direct experience, giving both actors and audience members important insights about themselves and the systems that we all live in.