September 2009 Archives

Here’s something useful for student members of Equity. On Wednesday 07 October, the performing arts industry’s trade union is running a training day at Savoy Theatre in London.

The programme includes a session about how to structure a CV which will actually promote and sell your wares, something every drama student needs to know. There will also be a working tour of the famous Savoy Theatre — another bonus for drama students bent on a career in the theatre. Also included is lunch with invited guests (for networking and picking up contacts), a lecture on physical story telling by Guy Masterson and a chance to quiz Equity officials about the industry and the union’s role in it in a question and answer session. Dreamboats and Petticoats is currently running at the Savoy and course participants on the day be given a ticket to the evening performance.

All Equity student members are on full-time, performance-related or creative team courses at drama school or university. Organisers are expecting around 60 to take part in the course on 07 October.

Or maybe you are ready to go and an apprenticeship would suit you. Balletboyz began life (under a different name) in 2000, founded by former Royal Ballet principal dancers Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. Through extensive TV and theatre work Balletboyz has established an enviable ethos and reputation based on innovation, excellence, entertainment and legacy.

In open auditions are taking place this month to recruit eight new male dancers, aged between 18 and 24, followed by a UK tour during March 2010.

These young dancers - part of a project called ‘Balletboyz: the next generation’ - will undergo a form of ‘practical apprenticeship’. They may be in training, professional or pre-professional, as long as they demonstrate exceptional talent, the ability to entertain and a commitment to excellence. As part of this ‘apprenticeship’ they will learn all aspects of being a company member - from studio etiquette and working with choreographers to touring and the ambassadorial role of a dancer on tour. They will also be trained in the delivery of education and outreach work and will be expected to deliver workshops while on tour.

Nunn and Trevitt will oversee all aspects of the show’s creation and will direct and produce - including making the linking films.

The programme will include a re-working of Russell Maliphant’s celebrated duet Torsion (created for Nunn and Trevitt in 2004) and a new commission by ROH2 Associate Artist Freddie Opoku-Addaie.

I’m enjoying elevenses and a chat with Miranda Harris of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance - to give the Greenwich/Deptford arts education merger its full name. Harris has the less than snappy job title of Publicity Relations and Internal Communications Manager and what she is telling me about the range of training, education, research and community work going on in SE8 and beyond is pretty impressive.

I am particularly taken, for example, with Laban’s work to encourage boys into dance - a delicious irony since, many moons ago, I began my teaching career in a ‘challenging’ (the polite word) all-boys’ school, long since demolished, in Creek Road Deptford and just round the corner from where Laban’s award-winning building now stands. We bred a lot of plumbers, carpenters and builders, a handful of university types and more than our fair share of thieves. But sadly and unsurprisingly, I don’t recall any dancers.

How I love to hear of really imaginative new theatrical work for under-6s - arguably the most important and certainly the most challenging audience of all. M6 Theatre Company’s One Little Word begins its national tour next month. You can catch it in Inverness, Bath, Glasgow or London - among many other venues - in October and November if you missed it at Polka Theatre in May or at Leicester’s SPARK festival in June.

In the almost word-less ‘script’ two actors, Eve Robertson and Luke Walker (directed by Andy Manley), play together. They explore a new space and new objects. They dress up and they take turns. All is well until a decision has to be made about which of them is going to captain the ship they’ve created. And behind all this is Tayo Akinbode’s atmospheric original music. No wonder it seems to entrance most of the tinies who see it. “Can I come back here every day?” asked one four year old audience member.

“We have created a range of high quality, innovative theatre experiences to serve the needs of the under-6 age group,” a spokesman for the Rochdale-based company told me. “We aim to enrich their experiences of the world, extend their communication skills and enhance their emotional well-being.”

Are you a young dancer with a bent for choreography? Youth Dance England’s (YDE) Young Creatives scheme may be the training opportunity you’re looking for. It offers mentoring, support and a showcase. Applications for this year opened on September 1 and there are fifteen places.

Alex Mason and Sally Bower, both 17 and at school in Derbyshire, have just completed it and are thrilled with what they’ve learned and achieved. “We had to send in a video of our work - a duet we had devised on a summer 2008 course - and then we auditioned in London,” says Alex, explaining that they first found out about Young Creatives at Derby Dance where they have been learning ballet, tap and other styles since they were five or six years old. Their devised duet originated in their school studio looking at everyday life experiences such as travelling on the London Underground.

“We were then assigned to Katie Green as our mentor,” says Sally. Green trained at The Place and runs her own dance company. ‘During the year we did a weekend course and performances at Royal Opera House.’

Alex and Sally impressed Katie Green so much that she also invited them to perform at an event she was staging in the opera house at Buxton.

“Once you’ve been accepted there’s nothing competitive about the work,” Alex and Sally explain almost in unison. “We were given plenty of opportunities to work with different groups and different mentors.”

Both girls are now taking AS dance - the first in their school to do so. Alex has taken a Centre for Advanced Training course with Dance 4. She plans to study dance further and hopes to make it her career. Sally is more interested in Musical Theatre.

It’s good to hear of a performing company working with a university to offer what sounds like a sensible and practical shiny new post-graduate degree.

Trestle Theatre Company and Middlesex University are launching their MA course in Education (Drama) this term. They claim that it is the very first of its kind in the UK and I certainly know of nothing else quite like it, although there is a growing trend for collaboration between higher education institutions and theatre companies.

The three-year part time masters programme, which starts next month, is designed for teachers of, and lecturers in, Drama as well as Theatre Studies and Performing Arts teachers. It will run at Trestle Arts Base, a contemporary performing arts centre in St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Trestle’s Associate Director, Oliver Jones says, “Trestle has for many years been at the forefront of creating and presenting innovative programmes of work for schools, colleges, and universities through its unique brand of physical, visual theatre and hugely popular education workshops. We are building on this reputation by creating an MA in drama education.”

Trestle and Middlesex University go back a long way. The founding members of the Company were performing arts students at Middlesex University (then Middlesex Polytechnic) in the 1970s. Inspired by their course tutor, John Wright, the students set up the Company in 1981 and established Trestle as one of Britain’s leading theatre companies.

The MA Programme Leader and Deputy Director for Professional Development, Kevin Morris says: “This is an exciting addition to our established MA portfolio and will give drama teachers an opportunity to gain an MA in their subject so that they can improve their practice. We believe that this should have a direct relationship to raising standards in schools.”

Oliver Jones adds: “All the hallmarks of Trestle’s work: physicality, storytelling and devising are now at the heart of the drama and theatre studies curriculum, and it is a perfect time to launch what we are hoping will be a very successful and sustainable MA degree.”

Fancy it? If so, they want you to apply immediately. Contact Programme Leaders Kevin Morris (Middlesex) on 0208 411 4310 or Oliver Jones (Trestle) on 01727 850 950.

Ben Hunt founded Nice Swan Theatre Company at the beginning of this year. Doesn’t seem particularly remarkable until you realise that Hunt is still a student studying English & Drama (BA) at the University of Sunderland. His company is entirely student-run and aims to provide an outlet not only for students interested in performance but also for those wanting to get involved in stage work, lighting, sound, set design, marketing and so on. He has scoured the Tyne and Wear area to find the right people to work with.

Now Hunt is ‘realising his dream’ by directing Rent, the company’s first major production. The show runs from October 28-31 at The Peoples Theatre, Newcastle. ‘This production is something special because it’s the pulling together of the student community building a bridge to the rest of the region via such a fantastic musical with an incredible story,’ he enthuses.

I’m in the glorious 17th century St James Church, Piccadilly, soaking up the Wren architecture and Grinling Gibbons carving. But the main purpose is a rehearsed reading - by Diana Quick, Lucy Briggs-Owen and Roger Lloyd Pack - of extracts from Margaret Atwood’s new novel, directed by Irina Brown. There’s a choir singing splendid parodies of guitar-accompanied evangelical hymns. The author is on stage too and there’s a deal of education and training going on as we learn more about The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury) and watch and listen to fine acting.

It was a bit odd to be specifically invited in advance by a PR person to whom I RSVP’d and who warmly welcomed me at the press desk in the foyer only to be peremptorily told by an usher in the packed church that she had ‘run out of press seats.’ My companion and I would simply have to ‘sit where you can,’ she said. It is usual (and courteous) to reserve seats for the number of guests you’ve invited.

Anyway, we found couple of seats under the balcony at the back and we could hear and see reasonably well so I’ll let it pass because I received an unsolicited apology the next day and, when it got going, the event itself was very original and enjoyable. Atwood herself jokingly reminded us at the beginning that this reading with hymn music specially composed by Orville Stoeber and toured to 18 countries - a slightly different version for each - was described in The Times as a ‘bizarre project.’

Grinling Gibbons’s carved swags of fruit round the altar and the elegance of Wren’s arched rectangular geometry make St James a perfect venue for Atwood’s inventive, satirical, planetary disaster story and how an earnest religious group copes (or not) with it. And as a unique crossover event it certainly put a new spin on assumptions about performance. Was it a book launch? Was it a play? Was it a concert? Was it a fundraiser? (There was an emphasis on conservation to avoid the disaster foretold in the novel and a retiring collection for Birdlife International and the RSPB).

The Year of the Flood didn’t, perhaps, set out to be an education event. But it certainly developed into one. Such a lot of learning. Such a lot of fun. Given the popularity of Atwood’s novels as A level set texts it would have been good to see a few more young people there.

So Edinburgh is over for another year. 2,098 shows in three weeks and tens of thousands of happy, quirky, rueful memories. But I’m a bit concerned about children in all this, especially the indigenous Scots.

As ever the Fringe had a wealth of offerings for juvenile audiences. Children’s shows occupied 10 pages of quite small print in the Fringe Programme. Ice Cream Man and the Jelly Incident (Jammy Doughnut) Dilly Dilly (Tabula Rasa) and Burglar Bill (Pandora’s Box) were just a few of the kids’ show which caught my eye along with Jo Jingles goes to the Seaside (Craiglockhart Parish Church) and Dude! Where’s my Teddy Bear (Jammy Doughnut). There were some very appealing shows for older children, teenagers and young adults of school age too such as Sleeping Beauty and the Time Lords (Spotlites) and The BFG (BG Touring).

But just who was it all meant for? The Edinburgh Festival ran from August 7 to 31, which works pretty well for visiting children who live south of the border and were on summer holiday until this week. But Scottish schools operate on a completely different timetable. Depending on the area, Scottish school children were back at their desks for the autumn term on 17, 18 or 19 August. That means that for nearly two weeks of the 24-day fringe festival, local children could attend events only at weekends.

Can you see any point in having this huge jamboree of a festival at a time when substantial swathes of what should be the target audience can’t get to the shows? It simply isn’t acceptable - to me at least - that these children’s shows are, in practice, mounted just for visitors from elsewhere. Imagine a festival held in London with dozens of daytime weekday shows for children and families running in June. It would be daft and no one would do it.

All that effort and all that quality should be for Scottish children too. A case for bringing the festival forward?