August 2009 Archives

If you can’t beat them join them. I am now a twitterer (SusanElkinJourn) and on of one the first tweets (messages) posted to me on this suddenly-it’s-everywhere social networking site said ‘I automatically follow geeks like you’ which fairly and squarely puts me in my place. Must be because I mentioned (shhhh… !) a book I was reading. Anyway, follow me if you’re so minded, for thoughts, mention of this blog, links to articles and the like. And geek that I am I don’t suppose shall be able to resist the books stuff for long either.

Away from froth and frivolity but strong on fun I see that Shakespeare 4 Kidz (not in the least geeky) is launching into films having entertained (and educated) thousands of children nationwide with its upbeat musical versions for some year now. S4K’s Hamlet in 3D will be the first of a series of six musical movie adaptations based on the company’s stage show of the musical versions of the Bard’s plays.

Julian Chenery, S4K’s founder and material writer, and I go back some time.

Two sparky new training-related books have landed on my desk this week, both courtesy of Nick Hern Books. Although quite different in flavour and intent, both pack plenty of insights into theatre and its workings. Essential reading, I think, for anyone wanting to know more about the many and various crafts involved in creating performance.

First comes Richard Eyre’s Talking Theatre: Interviews wuth Theatre People and a jolly good read it is too. Eyre, of course, worked for years in regional theatre before his ten-year stint as Artistic Director of The National Theatre (1988-1997) during and since which he has conducted interviews with dozens of people who created or influenced theatre in the second half of the twentieth century.

I received an email from the ebullient and irrepressible Kevin Dowsett last week and I wish I had half his energy. He is President of European Drama Encounters (EDERED) as well as founder of Theatretrain, the very successful chain of part-time stage schools for children. It was EDERED’s summer holiday project that he wanted to tell me about.

I am constantly being told about, or noticing, new learning opportunities of various sorts ranging from a one day tasters to full-blown full-time vocational courses - and all stations in between. Of the many whose details have reached me this week two providers have particularly interesting offerings.

First is next week’s Audition Boot Camp at The Actors Centre (there’s one this week too but the details reached me too late to tell you about that). It’s an intensive five-day course for ‘those who are considering a career in acting and want to prepare and hone their audition technique.’ During the week (24-27 August 10.30am-5.50pm), which costs £350, you get workshops with experienced tutors, directors and performers. The promise is that you will emerge with ‘a practical understanding of text and character, basic vocal and movement skills, the art of improvisation and at the end of the week you will walk away, armed for auditions with two polished speeches, one classical and one contemporary, and plenty of tips and techniques to keep you relaxed in audition situations’ Quite something if it delivers what it says it does.

The course is open to anyone with ‘commitment and determination’ and class size is restricted to 12. Further details are on the Actors Centre website or you can email bookclass@actorscentre.co.uk or call 020 7632 8002.

I am also impressed by what the Advanced Performers Studio (APS) is offering. It runs regular evening and weekend workshops and masterclasses for professional actors and singers. Workshops run in 5-week courses throughout the year with a maximum of 12 participants who have to audition.

In the past acting workshops have covered Method, Text, Scene Studies from Contemporary Plays at the Royal Court theatre, scene studies, Laban/psychological gesture, Shakespeare, voice, film/TV while singing workshops include weekly singers’ performance classes with West End musical directors and masterclasses with directors of West End shows.

Naturally APS is keen to tell you that past workshop providers include Big Names such as Hugh Grant, Lindsay Posner, Melly Still, Dominic Dromgoole, Dan Bowling, Joel Fram, Greg Arrowsmith and David Grimgrod. And sessions are held in prestigious venues such as The Royal Academy of Music, Jerwood Space and the Royal Court.

If you are interested APS wants you to send a covering letter and recent photo to info@performersstudio.co.uk or there are more details on its website. Failing all that try phoning 020 7381 8569.

There’s a new development at APS too. In January it starts its new three-month intensive course entitled Music Theatre Studio.

The plan is to run this twice a year ‘for 12 exceptionally talented singers, who have the potential and ability to become principal artists’ - effectively a link between training at musical theatre schools and the profession.

The first course will run three days a week plus two evenings from January to the beginning of April 2010.

‘The course will focus on developing and refining the singers’ existing vocal, acting and dance skills, whilst developing stamina. And singers will absorb a wide variety of ideas through our eminent teaching staff,’ an APS spokesperson told me.

It includes weekly individual coaching sessions with a singing teacher and a repertoire coach (West End musical directors) as well as ballet, jazz (focusing on musical theatre routine), Pilates and Laban work along with acting sessions to include method, improvisation, text and psychological gesture. The second half of the course features masterclasses with prominent artistic directors, musical directors, agents, casting directors and performers.

Admission is by audition only and there’s a £40.00 fee. All the details are on the website and/or use the APS email and phone number given above.

As ever, if you want to try training, get into training or retrain there’s probably an opportunity out there somewhere to help you decide what your next step should be - even if it’s only the (valuable) experience of an unsuccessful audition.

Stagecoach teaches performing arts skills part-time to over 30,000 children in 700 schools all over the world. It pioneered the concept of franchised stage schools for children over 20 years ago and remains by far the biggest player in the UK with 600 schools spread the length and breadth of the country.

So, although the Stagecoach raison d’être is personal development rather than star creation, it’s hardly surprising that when it auditions rigorously across those schools for a group of 8-17 year olds to take part in Easy Stages, its annual quasi summer school, you get something pretty good. I went to Leatherhead Theatre in Surrey last week to see Stagecoach’s crème de la crème in action.

I first saw actor/facilitator Jim Pope in action with a class in a Wandsworth Primary School several years ago and I was bowled over by his classroom charisma. To this day he remains one of the finest ‘engagers’ of young people I have ever seen at work. It would probably solve the country’s educational ills in one fell swoop if every youngster could have a few sessions with him.

So I was delighted to catch up with what he is doing now. The joys of freelance life: this month he’s in Edinburgh with Your Number’s Up (at the Assembly Rooms in George Street until 23 August) and our first conversation was via his mobile on a train heading north. It’s a play which grew out of Pope’s Thursday evening come-all-ye young people’s theatre company at the Round House. Devised with, and scripted by, Philip Osment the show has a cast of 10 young people aged 17-25.

Then it’s back to London hotfoot for Fathers Inside, directed by Pope, which previews at Soho Theatre in London from 28 August and runs in rep until 12 September.

“I did some work with young fathers - under 21 - at HMP Rochester in Kent,” says Pope who is the National Youth Theatre’s (part-time) Social Inclusion Programme Manager, a post which used to be called Young Offenders’ Programme Manager. “I met one young man, aged 19, who has 5 children and another only 15 with three kids. Some are in touch with their children and others are not. They are a very mixed group which tends to be forgotten by society at large.”

Eventually the prison workshops developed into a devised play which Osment has scripted. The name ‘Fathers Inside’ comes from a project run at HMP Wandsworth by Safe Ground, a charity which uses drama to address the needs of prisoners and young people at risk of social exclusion.

Admiration Theatre Company has just announced a sparky new education project. Tower Hamlet is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and no prizes for guessing which London Borough it’s set in.

The ambitious project uses five methods — Traditional British, Stanislavski, Lecoq, Mime, Grotowski — with lots of connected workshops for local community, youth and schools in the Borough. It will culminate in a performance at The Brady Arts Centre in Victoria Park in June next year, following the company’s production of Romeo and Juliet (pictured) at Docklands on the Isle of Dogs this year.

Five small groups of experienced actors - one group for each tradition - will each be given four scenes from Shakespeare’s play to create in their tradition, but also with a brief to be mindful of local history and geography.

The purpose is public education. Admiration Theatre, clearly not short of missionary zeal, wants to bring to the British public a greater awareness of theatre as an art form with different traditions. Just as visual art has expressionism and conceptual art and music has Baroque and folk, so theatre, of course, also comes in different styles. What, for instance, is traditional British theatre and how can it be defined? “It is important that our own traditions are not forgotten when considering global influences,” says Admiration Theatre’s Artistic Director, John Seaforth.

Stanislavksi is “the greatest single influence on theatre training of all time,” according to Seaforth, and Lecoq — that popular alternative to naturalistic theatre — has to be there because the tradition is widely known in London and for adaptations of Shakespeare.

And why mime? “It is underrated in Britain,” argues Seaforth. “In France mime is seen by some as the ultimate theatre form, with all potential expression and creativity originating from the human form.” And the project includes the radical innovator Grotowski because, from the 1960s onwards, for many in theatre he signalled a change in theatre, from acting as ‘representation’ to acting as ‘being’.

“We believe that putting these five Methods together in one production is the best way to create for the audience a public debate on theatre as an art form,” says Seaforth, telling me that the first workshops will start next month.

And what was that about local history and geography? “The production team and actors will research the cultural history of the borough and all the different kinds of locations in Tower Hamlets,” Seaforth explains. “This will then affect the choices made, regarding where scenes are set, how the characters behave, how they talk, what the piece is about, etc. For example, a scene might be set in the docks in the 1930s.”

Meanwhile the company is in the process of searching for more cultural partners to work with it on Tower Hamlet. Equity (North and East London branch) and The Mercers Charitable Foundation are already on board. And the Borough of Tower Hamlets will almost certainly be involved.

Meanwhile some rehearsals will be open to the public. There will be classes at the Brady Arts Centre for the community and for actors. A schools programme will bring this imaginative project to the Borough’s schools before, during and after the production and open days, when the public can meet the creators of this work, are planned.

Want to take part? Email towerhamlet@admirationtheatre.co.uk,

Because I am the Stage’s Education and Training Editor hardly a day goes by without someone in the industry telling me that school students are simply not being given accurate, helpful information about the very real (and growing) range of backstage work opportunities.

We all bewail the gloomy mantra fed to youngsters by teachers, parents and careers people that actors rarely work so forget it and work in a bank instead. But what about all the other roles in the performing arts for many of which there are serious and worsening skills shortages?

Well, that is why The Stage itself recently published a set of e-books (I edited the introduction and the one on set construction) to give interested students and their (sceptical?) parents some solid factual information about working backstage, bearing in mind that, on average, there are four people behind the scenes to support every performer you see on stage. The other titles in the series cover Costume and Makeup (edited by Paul Vale), Lighting and Sound (edited by Geoffrey Joyce) and Stage Management (edited by Barbara Eifler.)

The latest person to mention this problem to me is Gill Foreman, Head of Outreach and Informal Education at Arts Ed Schools, former Acting Head of the RSC’s Young People’s Programme and former Head of Education at Bristol Old Vic. Her book A Practical Guide to Working in Theatre Backstage was published last week by A&C Black.

Each chapter looks in detail at what each role entails, the main people it involves working with and the skills it requires. Roles covered include director, designer, sound and lighting, front of house, playwright and many more. The advice is based on Foreman’s experience as a director and educationist and she thinks it is significant that she has never been an actor. ‘But I’ve worked in companies large and small, repertory and producing - with two career breaks, once when I had to be a carer for my grandparents and then again through illness - so I come at this from a pretty broad perspective,’ she tells me.

Foreman has based her book partly on interviews with well known practitioners such as Nicholas Hytner (National Theatre), Simon Reade (Bristol Old Vic), Rachel Kavanaugh (Birmingham Rep), David Edgar (Playwright) and Jack Bradley (Literary Manager). Quotes from these, and others, are woven into Foreman’s text and an extended interview rounds off each chapter. ‘There are still interviews, or parts of them, which I couldn’t, in the end, squeeze into the book,’ she says. ‘So we’re planning to put those online. Then I can update them as things change culturally or because of government policy. That will keep the book fresh.’

One of Foreman’s main points is that you can often earn a living in the performing arts by thinking laterally and coming at it obliquely. ‘Suppose you want to be a playwright,’ she says. ‘It’s very unlikely that you will be able to sell scripts at the beginning of your career, but you might get work as a script editor or reader which will teach you a lot about the dos and don’ts of how plays are structured. This will improve the standard of your own writing - and you can pay the bills at the same time.’

And there are jobs in the performing arts which, generally, neither school leavers nor their careers advisors are aware of at all. Foreman cites education management as an example. Companies also need administrators, tour arrangers, people to manage catering at the venue and plenty more.

Meanwhile, back at the performance end of the industry, Foreman reports that it is almost impossible to hire ‘a decent stage manager’ especially for smaller companies outside London. ‘If you have the skills you will never be out of work’ she says. A point well worth heeding in these recessionary times of high unemployment.

‘Young people need as much information as we can give them because they can’t make good decisions without it.’ Says Foreman who thinks that her book - and she’s a virgin author - is the first to assemble so much information about so many roles, skills and opportunity in one place.

As part of their course, acting students at LAMDA are receiving training in captioning and audio description to help them understand how theatre can become more inclusive

Above: VocalEyes audio describer Willie Elliott

Amber-lit captions for the introductory monologue from Antony Sher’s play Primo are turning on a narrow screen, perfectly in synch with Sher’s voice, manually controlled though a computer. But no, this isn’t a production. It’s an innovative training session at LAMDA’s MacOwan Theatre to introduce the school’s two-year acting students to the principle of captioning, which allows deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people to enjoy a show — and Sher is with us only on film.

Stagetext, founded in 2000, is the lead charity which promotes and provides captioning at specified performances. Earlier in the afternoon, students have learned about audio description and how it works too. Blind and partially sighted people can book the services of VocalEyes — a charity established in 1998 — so that they get advance information, a pre-show touch tour and, most importantly, a live description of costumes, action on stage and stage business delivered to them via headsets which work with infrared radiators in the theatre.

Stagetext and VocalEyes, both funded by Arts Council England, worked with LAMDA to provide this training on the premise that it is the kind of backstage work which many actors are unaware of, or even hostile to, by resenting, for example, the prominent presence of a captioning board on the set or the way in which it can show up an actor who isn’t secure with their lines.

Here’s some good news for young theatregoers: Theatre Centre - with its usual mission to bring new voices and collaborations to young audiences - has a bright shiny new play for 14+ starting next month. Ashmeed Sohoye’s Rigged is the first work to be commissioned by Theatre Centre’s new Artistic Director, Natalie Wilson, who also directs the play.

The tour opens at the Redbridge Drama Centre on 17 September and tours extensively to both schools and theatre venues around the UK. The press night is on 13 October at Unicorn Theatre, London at 7.00 pm where the play will run for five days. The tour resumes in January 2010 and continues until February.

Wilson commissioned the play after seeing a reading of another of Sohoye’s plays, the poetry and craft of which struck her forcibly. Sohoye had just started a new position as Learning Mentor at a north London school, so it made sense for him to have a good long look at school culture before deciding on subject matter for the play.

Although Sohoye is British Asian, he reported back to Theatre Centre that the burning issue for him was watching the white boys at school searching for identity and purpose. His new play is based on his work with those students and is about the battle between expectations, choices and breaking free.

Nathan has been excluded from school and spends his days in the gambling arcades. An ASBO bans him from the town centre, but his girlfriend Sarah has aspirations to continue her education. Then Sarah discovers she is pregnant. Can the two of them escape their dysfunctional families and create a secure life for themselves and their child, or is the system implacably set against them? Wilson describes it as ‘a compassionate and courageous play’ from which she expects ‘great debate to spark.’

The cast for Rigged is Paul Clerkin as Gary, Kyle Summercorn as Nathan, Niamh Webb as Sarah and Daisy Whyte as Kathy. Design is by Neil Irish, music by Stephen Hudson and lighting by Aideen Malone.

Ashmeed Sohoye studied English and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths University. He has written extensively for theatre and television and been Literary Manager for Theatre Royal Stratford East and Writers Workshop Leader at Soho Theatre - as well as his current role works as Learning Mentor at a London comprehensive school.

Natalie Wilson was appointed Artistic Director of Theatre Centre in September 2007. She was previously Associate Director of New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme and Assistant Director at 7:84 in Scotland as well as a busy freelance director.