November 2009 Archives

In 2000 I had fun by spending some time among the tents and caravans on the set for Glyndebourne Education’s youth opera, Zoe, which was being filmed on location for Channel 4 at Stanmer Park in Brighton. It was very satisfying - even exciting - to see so many young people achieving so much and shooting confidently past what might, under other circumstances, have been their own limited ambitions.

Since then Glyndebourne Education has mounted a number of other imaginative education projects and is now embarked on its sixth youth opera, the ambitious Knight Crew. It is rooted in Nicky Singer’s novel based on the King Arthur legend which she, and director John Fulljames, have adapted for the stage.

Glyndebourne’s first-ever composer-in-residence, Julian Philips, has written the music and Es Devlin is designing the sets for the show which will be staged in March with the same production values as any other Glyndebourne Opera.

I’ve been talking to Brian Timoney whose training organisation, The Brian Timoney Actors’ Studio in north London, expanded this term to offer a one-year, part-time course in Method Acting a la Lee Strasberg and co. (cost: £ 9,775).

“We are trying to offer something different,” he tells me, “by being a boutique drama school focusing entirely on Method Acting as opposed to the big schools which take the portfolio approach. Method Acting is one small part of what they do.”

He also feels strongly that every drama student should be taught to manage him or herself as a business. “We bring in marketing experts and casting directors to teach these skills,” he says, adding that potential actors are creative people by definition and they need to learn to use some of that creativity to sell themselves to the industry.

Until this year Timoney’s school offered only short, intensive courses with the option to re-attend and actors such as Jamie Roberts and Freya Parker passed through these. He still runs three-day ‘boot camps’ in Method Acting (cost: £495). Students are beginning to use these as tasters to help them decide whether or not to commit themselves to the year-long, part-time course which runs mainly at weekends with other ad hoc sessions. The part-time includes a week in Los Angeles training both in Method Acting and in business management for actors, the cost of which is included in the fee.

So who teaches the students, week by week, back in London? Timoney himself does some, of course, and he has four other teachers working with him. “We audition our teachers before we take them on which I think is probably fairly unusual,” Timoney tells me. “But we have to be sure the people we are employing really do know and understand the Method. All our teachers are working professionally elsewhere as well.”

I can’t help wondering how much notice the industry is likely to take of a small, non-accredited school which restricts itself to one way of working, but Timoney seems sure of his ground. “The Method is used by most successful actors, including many Hollywood stars, and we believe it meets the needs of the modern industry in a way that some traditional ways of working no longer do,” he says.

There are places for 20 students who are recruited twice-yearly in groups of 10 and this year the school has its full complement. Students do a showcase at the Groucho club to which casting directors and agents are invited. They are also trained in film techniques and produce a showreel.

£9,775 in tuition fees seems a lot to find given that students have to be self-funding, although the part-time nature of the course is such that participants can, of course, work at the same time to pay the fees and keep themselves.

On the other hand, if the course is as effective as Timoney says it is and its ‘graduates’ get work at the end of it (and these are two big ‘ifs’) then it is cheaper than three years in drama school with annual fees of over £3,000 and three years’ keep to pay for too.

But wouldn’t you have to be unusually confident in your own talent and the efficacy of the Method to put all your eggs in one training basket as Timoney advocates? Let’s hear your thoughts and experiences, please.

I came out of the opening night of Intermission Youth Theatre’s deeply moving, theatrically powerful and professionally impressive revival of Darren Raymond’s play Wasted feeling as if I’d been kicked in the stomach.

And yet this youthful take on Julius Caesar is also profoundly uplifting because it has brought together young people from London’s inner city communities who may be at risk and provided them with a real purpose in life. Given the context, it also makes sense to have based the work on the ultimate knife crime drama. The cast talk to camera in a short videoed documentary at the end. I am humbled by their articulacy, humanity and intelligence.

So where to begin?

I ran into Julia Potts, Head of Creative Learning for Ambassador Theatre Group the other day. And now that ATG is Britain’s largest theatre operator with 35 venues, having recently sealed a deal to buy 16 theatres across the country, her potential educational empire is huge.

Ambassador Theatre Group already supports a programme of Creative Learning activities across its theatres in the UK and there are education packs available for teachers to download on its website for many plays currently or recently running in its theatres from The Witches to Whose Life is it Anyway? and from West Side Story to Brief Encounter. It also offers regular workshops for schools on the long-running shows Blood Brothers and The Woman in Black.

Regionally, ATG’s theatres in Bromley, Glasgow, Milton Keynes, Stoke-on-Trent, Richmond and Wimbledon all have Creative Learning Departments which deliver, Potts tells me, “a regular and varied programme of events and classes.” She adds: “All programmes include activities related to the shows being presented in the theatres as well as opportunities to explore theatre-making more generally and to build personal skills.”

Then there are ATG’s regular events “exploring the options available to young people interested in a career in theatre” and a Work Placements and Careers in Theatre section on the Creative Learning section of its website.

It’s good to know, too, that ATG is an active member of Action for Children’s Arts and endorses its recent Manifesto for Children’s Arts, inspired by Article 31 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child:

Every child has the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

Amidst the anxious reaction to ATG’s recent expansion - about monopolies and lack of competition - perhaps we should bear in mind that the more theatres the group has the more high-quality education and training Potts and her team will be able to provide. And that can’t be a bad thing.

One of the very best things about my hugely enjoyable and delightfully varied job is hearing/seeing young people from all walks of life excelling in the arts - and last week I got to not one, but two splendid such events. And even, better, they were both music based and that’s an art form very dear to my heart.

First there were the Schools Proms, Music for Youth’s annual, three-night jamboree in the Royal Albert Hall. Music for Youth works with 100,000 young musicians nationwide each year. The 47 items you hear at the Schools Proms are just the tip of a very fine iceberg - and it gets finer every year, to such an extent you sit there wondering incredulously if it really can be better still next year.

Groups are drawn from schools, local authorities, music education providers and anywhere else that young people under 19 make music together.

This time I’m especially taken with 15-17 year olds from Bents Green Special School in Sheffield playing a piece called Rain Dance. It’s lump in the throat stuff - special in every sense.

I’m at the Piccadilly Theatre, not to see Grease but to find out what The National Skills Academy for Creative & Cultural Skills (if only they’d though of a snappier name) is telling 13-15 year olds about backstage careers.

This is one of 15 events known as Offstage Choices which NSACCS (I shall lose the will to live if I have to keep typing it in full) are running across the country from Keswick and Gateshead in the north to Bridgewater and Portsmouth in the south in October, November and December. Each is held at an industry member’s venue in partnership with one of NSACCS’s 19 founder further education colleges - Westminster College in the case of the one I’m at.

I join a group of 14 and 15 year olds (year 10) from Pimlico Academy in Westminster who are being talked through how a sound mixing desk works. They hear some of the Grease soundtrack and see the wires beneath the desk. And they ask very sensible questions, although several of them admit that they’ve never been inside a theatre or seen a show until today (complimentary tickets for tonight’s Grease are part of the deal). I learn nearly as much about sound mixing as they do.

Then it’s on to Stage management. On the Grease set they are talked through what the Stage Manager, Production Manager and Deputy Stage Manager do to make sure the show runs smoothly. Like the students I learn masses in a very short time although I don’t take part in the practical scene change assignment.

Now I’m with a group from the other school involved in the day. These are from Quintin Kynaston School,Westminster. They’re in Year 9 and some are still only 13. In two lively sessions, one on marketing and one on the role of the producer, they are interactively talked through how you come up with an idea for a show and finance it - and having done that, how you ‘place’ and sell your product. They are made to think about things such as what sort of people are likely to come to Grease with good seats selling at around £45,who can afford to advertise on underground escalator windows at £2,000 for 200 stations, how big a venue does a show need and how may people have to be paid.

I am deeply impressed by the quality of the staff upfront, most of whom are employed by Ambassadors Theatre Group which owns Piccadilly Theatre. These people are professional technicians, managers, marketing experts and so on. None is a teacher but every one of them is very skilled at it and you can feel the youngsters learning like an electric current.

It is often said anecdotally (and if anyone has hard evidence please get in touch) that school children are sold short by careers advisers who know nothing about performing arts job opportunities. If NSACCS can run events of this calibre - and do it annually - they have the potential to reach 1000s of school students (and their teachers) and to plug the information gap in a way which makes a real difference.

The Stage offers a range of ebooks for people interested in starting a career backstage. For more details, go to www.thestage.co.uk/ebooks

I’ve been talking to the dynamic and enthusiastic Emily Gray, ‘new’ artistic director at Trestle Theatre Company (although she’s been there five years) and her colleague, Olly Jones, about their rather impressive education programme.

Since 2002 the company, which used to be nomadic, has been based in the pretty splendid Trestle Arts Base, a converted chapel in St Albans. This means they can offer cradle-to-grave participative drama opportunities from Story Tent for tinies to Trestle People’s Company for grown ups with lots of goodies in between. The latest to start is a weekly after-school session for 5-7 year olds which means that every age group is now covered. So however old (or young) you are, if you’re within hailing distance of St Albans there’s something there for you.

And that’s in addition to all the workshops Trestle offers to teachers and others on masks and physical theatre and the show-specific workshops they run in primary and secondary schools nationwide to link with their tours. The Glass Mountain, inspired by a Polish folk story with emphasis on Eastern European singing and its physicality, is the current one.

This term Trestle launched another first: an MA in Education (Drama) delivered at Trestle Arts Base over three years part-time in collaboration with Middlesex University. ‘We have 8 students enrolled for this year says Jones, Programme Leader for Trestle (Kevin Morris is his counterpart at the university). ‘We are really pleased with the way it’s going and there’s a lot of interest from teachers wanting to start next year when we think we shall have a group of at least 15.’

Have you noticed? We seem to be reaching a stage, and what a wonderful thing it is too, when education and drama are so inextricably linked that they are like two sides of the same coin. Long may such homogeneity last and develop.

I’m at Shakespeare’s Globe munching delicious cookies (billed as ‘breakfast’ because it’s 9.30am) and enjoying chat with primary school teachers from nine north-of-the-river London boroughs along with education providers and project mangers from dozens of London arts organisation.

We are here courtesy of John Lyon’s Charity which is part of the Harrow School Foundation. It supports education and the arts to the tune of hundreds of thousand of pounds every year on its wonderfully, rather quaintly named ‘beneficial area.’

But today something new and very welcome is being launched. A year ago John Lyon’s Charity sponsored a conference at the Soho Theatre, Working with Young People through theatre: the Primary Stage. I was there and we reported it in The Stage. And isn’t it great (and so rare!) when concerns voiced and aired at a conference actually turn into something concrete?

It’s always good to hear of organisations with clout working together for the common good. So I was pleased to see that Youth Dance England’s annual performance and mentoring programme, YDE Young Creatives, is linking with the Royal Opera House and Royal Ballet School for 2010.

YDE Young Creatives supports 15-19 year olds - the ones with a passion for choreography who want to get better at it. The programme offers one-to-one mentoring from dance artists and choreographers, selected by YDE.

A substantial part of the YDE Young Creatives programme is a three-day residential. This time it will be held at The Royal Ballet School’s White Lodge, near Richmond, offered as part of the partnership. This former Royal hunting lodge, which has recently been extensively restored and redeveloped, is home to the Royal Ballet’s Lower School. It has high specification dance studios and good residential facilities.

The ROH partnership means YDE Young Creatives can showcase their work at a performance in the ROH Linbury Studio. Both the residential and performance will take place in April 2010. Applications are open now.

As you would expect YDE is pretty pleased with its new partnerships. Its Director, Linda Jasper, said: ‘YDE is delighted to be working with two such highly esteemed and respected dance organisations. These partnerships offer YDE Young Creatives a great leap forward in terms of what we are offering talented choreographers of the future.’ And as for the students, one of the 2009 cohort described what she did as ‘an honour to be part of the experience’ and a ‘marking moment’ in her life. Youth Dance England is the national organisation which champions and promotes dance for children and young people. Funded by Arts Council England, Department for Culture Media and Sport and Department for Children Schools and Families Music and Dance Scheme, YDE was awarded £5.5 million in 2008 to develop dance opportunities for children and young people across England.