Le Rag Club!

Le Rag Club 2008 is the first of the 18 Paris projects emerging from the Coombe Development Team staff trip to Paris in November, funded by the Modern Foreign Languages Specialist School and the Training School.

The evening was conceived as a cross-curricular learning event and is the outcome of several projects, inside and outside the classroom, loosely based on the theme ‘My Journey’ and draws on the students’ ideas, their trip to Paris on 6th February 2008, as well as other personal ‘journeys’ they have taken in their lives. It also allows students some space to display their talents and interests.

The Mayor of Kingston came to Coombe Sixth Form on Monday 10th March to officially begin the Sixth Form’s Rag Week, a week long charity event which climaxed on Thursday with ‘Le Rag Club’, an evening production put on by students from the Sixth Form. The Mayor personally thanked the students on behalf of UNICEF, the chosen charity Coombe Sixth Form voted on fundraising for.

UNICEF is an international charity under the umbrella of the United Nations who conducts many improvement projects for those in need. The money that is raised by Coombe will go towards the estimated 4.5 million refugees that are affected by the conflict in the region of Darfur and nearby Chad. This money can be used to buy simple necessities that people need to survive these harsh times.

During last week, students at Coombe Sixth Form raised money by holding street collections, running stalls and dressing up, as well as creating and buying the Coombe Rag Week’s official t-shirt.

The theme this week has been on journeys representing the many hundreds of miles some refugees have to travel in Darfur to reach aid. Coombe’s own journey, which many students went on, was to Paris which became the focus of the week’s festivities, Viva Le Rag Club!

The actual Rag Club night was a spectacular show on epic proportions. Every performance deserves to be mentioned but by popular vote three really stole the show, the first being an adaptation of ‘The Three Musketeers’, which had the audience rolling in the isles at the humorous and some-what catastrophic exploits of D'Artagnan.

The next amazing performance was the Indian dance troop from the Sixth Form who really showed us what ancient and modern Indian dance is all about. Starring Mayank Sharma from Coombe Boys’ School who got every girl in the audience screaming with his energetic dancing, his performance and that of the other Indian girls, was truly one of the greatest performances ever seen in a Coombe production and defiantly deserves the mention.

The third of the truly memorable performances of the night was the Can Can performed by the girls of Coombe Sixth Form.
Wearing the renowned outfits made notorious by Moulin Rouge, their performance was brilliantly danced. It encapsulated the fun and humour of the evening.

To say ‘Le Rag Club’ was all about the entertainment would do the night injustice; the message of Rag Week was always present: that all the money we raised that night and during RAG week will go to ease the suffering of the refugees in Darfur, giving them the chance to share in some of the happiness we experienced that night.