July 2009 Archives

Edinburgh may be a wonderful jolly for audiences and performers, but don’t forget that the Fringe also comes packed with a wealth of training opportunities as a quick browse through the Events section of the 2009 Fringe guide shows. While you’re enjoying yourself in exquisite Edinburgh you can learn while you play - and perhaps enhance some aspect of your own professional or amateur-at-the-moment-but would-like-to-change-that expertise.

I’m at The Barbican thoroughly enjoying a performance of Elgar’s Serenade for Strings and Sibelius’s 5th symphony conducted by the vibrant, dishy, age-proof Sir Colin Davis. Not his usual London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) but the Barbican Young Orchestra (BYO) and by golly they’re good. Not one of them is over 16 and some, incredibly, are only 9 and look so tiny that you can hardly believe they’re old enough to be out after tea, let alone play Sibelius to the manner born.

Vivienne Price, who founded the National Children’s Orchestra, once told me that you can’t ask children - however technically accomplished - to play whole symphonies because they don’t have the stamina, so she chose overtures and shorter works. Well, clearly, we’ve pushed the boundaries a few miles since then.

Now here’s an unusual partnership. Reveal Theatre Company (RTC) has teamed up with Keele University as a theatre company in residence on its Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course.

RTC is a professional production company established in 1997 with 13 shows under its belt along with a healthy education and outreach programme. The PGCE is the one year qualification taken by almost all trainee teachers who have completed a degree in another subject such as history or English. And it is the English and history PGCE students at Keele with whom RTC is working mostly, although it has also been involved with other subject areas such as geography, information and communications technology and modern foreign languages.

So what precisely have they done? Earlier this year RTC performed They Called it Paschendale at sites around Ypres in Belgium - with support from Keele University and Creative Partnerships Stoke on Trent. A professional documentary play in nine scenes for Belgian residents and tourists, the show consisted of the testimony of Great War soldiers alongside newspaper accounts, poems and the words of the King devised by participating actors such as Dominic Meir, Sean O’Callaghan, and Kevin McGreevy directed by Robert Marsden. 20 PGCE students from Keele were there too.

The idea was to allow students to experiment with creative ways of teaching history. The Belgian residency was the culmination of a year’s work with RTC and storyteller, Maria Whatton. They tried out, and made discoveries about, creative learning and creative techniques including role play, ‘mantle of the expert, documentary and verbatim theatre.

It certainly goes down well with the students. Abby Price, a trainee history teacher at Keele, for example says: ‘I have found the whole experience extremely useful for classroom practice. Having tried some of the drama strategies with pupils in my placements [in schools] I have understood how effective drama can be in the history classroom.’ And if Price’s response means that this approach will filter down into the classrooms of the future as people like her take jobs in schools that can only be a good thing.

RTC has been working with Keele University for three years although the 2008/9 academic year was the first time the relationship had been formalised as a residency. Last year the company worked with PGCE English and History students for a year creating characters from Renaissance Florence. The finale of that work was The Florentine Narrative which involved the trainee teachers responding in role to the theatre that they saw and undertaking tasks around the city.

All very creative and totally in tune with the way teachers are now expected to operate. Since the 1999 National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCE) report there has been a growing requirement that teachers should work and teach creatively and initiatives such as Compelling Learning Experiences along with the pressure to make lower secondary school lessons sparkier and more imaginative.

So the RTC/Keele partnership is very timely. Marsden, RTC co-director and guest lecturer at Stafford University Drama Department, is hoping that other universities running PGCE courses and other theatre companies will follow suit. ‘We think this model could be replicated in other PGCE delivery organisations across the UK’ he says, adding that ‘Practitioners at RTC and academics at Keele are both writing papers on creative learning and the way this partnership works.’

I’m in the Gielgud Theatre at RADA for a showcase. But this isn’t the usual drama school graduate job. No, I’m here for something far headier. This event is part of the first ever European Actors’ Continuing Training (ACT) programme run by the Actors’ Centre and the International Institute of Performing Arts in association with RADA and it marks the end of the programme’s first three weeks before it moves today from London to Paris.

And artistically the results are really quite extraordinary. It will be a long time before I forget the charismatic acting of Philippos Frangoulis, Tunde Makinde, Jeanette Rourke, Laurie Burke and several others in ‘Scenes from new work with a global edge.’ They come from all over the world and most of these actors already have strings of professional credits to their names.

What claims to be the world’s first international certificate in professional development for actors runs for eight weeks with 280 hours of training in London for three weeks from 29 June to 17 July, in Paris for three weeks from today (20 July) until 7 August and then finally in Berlin for two weeks from 10 to 22 August.

It is always good to hear of training opportunities and diverse work opportunities in this industry. And teaching drama to otherwise (perhaps) bored children, whose parents’ holiday choices have trapped them in resorts where there might not too much else for the kids else to do, is certainly a good one.

Razzmataz Theatre Schools is a very successful franchise group started in 2000 by Denise Hutton. It now has over 25 branches in the UK and a contract with Thomsons, the holiday company. This week it is training 35 teachers at its Head Office studios in Carlisle, Cumbria ready to fly out to 17 resorts worldwide including Dominican Republic, Mexico, Egypt, mainland Spain, Portugal, Greece and the Canaries.

During the three day preparatory course the teachers are trained in all aspects of Health & Safety, carrying out risk assessments in their venues, ensuring the children (and teachers) stay hydrated in 40 degrees for six and a half weeks - although their teaching space has air conditioning. “Our dedicated H&S advisor will be coming in to talk to them about the importance of always putting the child’s safety first and foremost at all times along with their own and that of their colleagues,” says Hutton, explaining that the company also has a Child Protection Officer to talk about Razzamataz’s Child Protection Policy and child welfare.

Trying to decide which drama school to apply to? How do you tell the good from the bad? Well, the best place to start is with a new, very sensible advisory pamphlet hot off the press from the Oxford School of Drama.

The Essentials: for excellence in vocational training for performing, production and technical careers sets out, in eight succinct pages, exactly what you are entitled to expect in a good school - a minimum of 30 hours a week in which you are taught by tutor as opposed to many unstructured hours of ‘private study’ for example.

And ‘You are entitled … to be taught by people who have been, or still are, working professionally in their specialist area of teaching and whom you respect’ the guide tells you firmly.

In other words, if you are offered the all-too-common university deal of just a few hours ‘contact time’ with classroom theoreticians, then that is not vocational training.

Some stage schools blow their own trumpets so loudly that everyone has heard of them. Others beaver away very competently at the back of the cellos (as it were) and nobody notices much them which is a shame. Barnet-based Susi Earnshaw Theatre School (SETS) is a bit like that. Founder, Susi Earnshaw tells me she’s ‘not very good at publicity’ which means that her excellent school is mostly drowned out of awareness by those much better known trumpets.

SETS is now in its 20th year and at its heart is a very successful full-time secondary school. Last year every student got at least 5 A-C grades at GCSE and one managed 13 passes - 7 at A, 5 at A and one at B - plus an A level equivalent in drama. This is a pretty outstanding record given that SETS does not select its pupils for academic ability - only for performing arts potential.

As well as following a strong academic curriculum SETS pupils, of course, also do ballet, tap, jazz, voice, acting, musicianship, theatre lighting, sound recording, stage management and arts administration.

The school is based at the Bull Theatre and was responsible for preventing it from being closed and turned into flats. “We now ensure that it is alive and available for community use without any government funding,” says Earnshaw.

When the eclectic pile of training resources - books, DVDs and so on - on the corner of my desk gets so big than I knock them off and onto the floor whenever I try to get to my seat, it is clearly time I picked a few of the most interesting and told you about them - then at least I can file the best and bin the rest. So here goes.

I love the DVD which The Lion King Education Programme has produced to mark the show’s tenth anniversary in London. Aimed at teachers bringing school parties to the show it consists of a series of vignettes presented by Matt Baker of Blue Peter fame. Each introduces the young theatregoers to a backstage aspect of the show such as costumes, masks and puppets, staging, choreography, music and so on. In effect it’s a virtual backstage tour with National Curriculum links and activities - including activity sheets for pupils - to help primary and secondary teachers. Thomas Schumacher, producer and president of Disney Theatrical Productions, says that ‘This behind the scenes DVD is unlike anything we’re ever created for one of our productions.’ I often draw attention to lack of awareness of backstage work at pre-vocational level. Perhaps this enterprising resource will help to redress that balance.

Still in pre-vocational territory, if you are GCSE drama teacher or student, there’s a good new study guide linked to the Edexcel syllabus. GCSE Drama Study Guide by Kelly McManus and Andrew Pullen (Rhinegold Education) sets out what the student needs to know and shows how to make useful notes on their reading and theatre experience in a very clear, systematic way. I especially like the sections on theatre layout, the role of the designer and the use of specific play texts and the techniques of practitioners. It is a fine example of a book which ably fills the knowledge gaps in what is essentially a practical subject.

Moving on to the point when these young people are ready to audition for drama school, enter two sparky new books of Shakespeare Monologues from Nick Hern Books (NHB). Both are edited by Luke Dixon and are part of NHB’s The Good Audition Guides series. Shakespeare’s Monologues for Men includes the wonderful ‘Speak, Lavinia, what accursèd hand / Hath made thee handless’ from Titus Andronicus and Don Armado’s potentially hilarious ‘I do affect the very ground’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as more obvious suggestions. Similarly the companion volume for women gives Constance’s ‘Gone to be married?’ speech from King John and the Jailer’s Daughter asking ‘Why should I love this gentleman?’ in Two Noble Kinsmen. Every monologue in these useful books is put briefly in context and comes with a ‘what to think about’ section.

So - whether you’re still at school or already a drama school or university student - are you aching to get into TV? If so you might find some worthwhile advice in How to Get a Job in Television by Elsa Sharp. (A&C Black) The book’s subtitle is ‘Build your career from runner to series producer’ and offers plenty of basic information such as where you should look for TV training schemes, how you get work experience and how to work out whether you are tough enough to work in the TV industry.

Lastly in this little round-up of newish training resources comes How Plays Work by David Edgar (NHB) which I found a fascinating read. Edgar is, of course, a distinguished playwright (Destiny, Pentecost, Nicholas Nickleby adaptation for RSC among many other successes) so he more than knows what he is talking about. There’s a great deal in this book, a sort of Masterclass in playwriting, for playwrights or students wanting to become playwrights - Edgar founded the Playwriting Studies course at the University of Birmingham in 1989. Equally there’s lot here for anyone else interested in plays: drama students, and theatregoers (not to mention arts/education journalists!) for example. What, he asks us, does King Lear have in common with Cinderella? What does Jaws owe to Ibsen? Are there common principles by which all plays work? Read it. You will learn a lot.

Last night I was at O2 Arena for the launch of Voices for a Better World, a project to raise funds for dedicated children’s charities Global Angels and Arts by Children - two international organisations which work at a grass-roots level to support the needs of children around the world. The architecturally unlovely, noisy, crowd-pulling Disney-esque dome - with its weird ideas about courtesy (or lack of it) to the press, inadequate lavatories and inconvenient access is not exactly my favourite venue but all my frustrations and grumbles were stopped short by the scale and power of the event itself once it started.

Kevin Dowsett, founder of Theatretrain — the very successful chain of franchised part-time stage schools for children — devised and directed the pretty spectacular show, The Long and Winding Road, which is based on the Beatles story and featured 34 Beatles tracks, including Ticket to Ride, A Hard Day’s Night and Can’t Buy Me Love. The massed chorus sang, conducted by the larger-than-life Robert Hyman with live orchestra, and there were solo numbers by youngsters who had auditioned and some short contributions by professionals such as Bill Bailey, Kevin Eldon, Cheryl Fergison, Elaine Glover, Tony Hirst and Nemsis.

But this was not a Theatretrain production. This time the main body of performers was 4,700 school children, aged 9-14, from primary, secondary, special and specialist schools in London and the south east. So it was quite a training experience for very large numbers and highly inclusive.