February 2011 Archives

I’ve been chatting to Alan Justice, principal of Herbert Justice Academy (HJA), to catch up on the latest developments at the theatre school he founded in 1997.

Now in its own fully refurbished building near Elmers End Station in London Borough of Bromley — as opposed to running classes piecemeal all over the district — HJA now offers a full-time, one-year course.

I’m going to see Alan Justice next month to find out more about all this because from September he will be offering three full-time training scholarships supported by The Stage, of which more in the paper in April.

Meanwhile he tells me on the phone — and I am very impressed — that he has just set up the HJA Arts Foundation, a fund to support 20 students in full-time training at HJA. From September 20 out of the school’s 60 students - that’s one in three - will have a bursary to pay two thirds of his or her training bill. “It brings the cost down to £995 a term, or less than £100 per week which I’m hoping will make this training more available to more people,” says Justice, who seems to fund most of his ventures from personal wealth accrued through a childhood career in modelling - and wise investment by his beloved and much missed parents. (The school is named after Justice’s father).

These 20 places plus the three Stage scholarships mean that there is a total of 23 assisted opportunities at HJA this autumn and I don’t know of any other school which could manage anything like as much.

And, of course, HJA is still teaching large numbers of children in part-time classes as well as running community classes for people of all ages - in its nice building, complete with theatre and café which I’m looking forward to seeing next month. When I last visited early last year the builders were still in.

Three interesting new training (in the widest sense of the word) books have landed on my desk in the last week so it’s time I told you about them so that I can put them somewhere else.

First is The Well Read Play by Stephen Unwin, founder of English Touring Theatre and now Artistic Director at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. His new title (from Oberon Books) is based on the intriguing premise that we have to learn to read plays with the same attention that we apply to novels. Well, I taught English for decades and always told students that plays are written to be performed and that you simply can’t compare a lifeless script, awaiting actors to bring it to life, with a novel which is a completed work of art in its own right — a hotline from, say, the Dickens brain to the Elkin brain without need of third party interpretation. So I was fascinated by Unwin’s approach which seemed, at first glance, to contradict everything I’ve always believed.

In fact of course, he agrees with me and acknowledges that “reading a play is an unnatural act.” He contends, however, that written drama has an ability to “entertain and communicate powerful insights about the individual and the world at large,” but that because many people find it hard to read plays he had written this book to help them. And it works surprisingly well.

Unwin discusses matters such as the play’s history, context and the effect, or relevance, of the playwright’s biography. He examines different play genres making the point that most plays - and especially the best ones - cannot be pigeon-holed very neatly. He examines characters in plays and the words given to them by the playwright. He is strong on how plays work in the theatre too, along with how to decide what a play means or is trying to tell you. And I enjoyed the chapter on how to read critically which would certainly have benefited my English A level students. And all this is supported by a hugely impressive range of examples from the Greeks and Shakespeare to Racine, Rattigan and Marber. In 230 pages it’s rare for Unwin to refer to the same play twice.

A useful book, then, from which I learned a lot and which has forced me to modify my view that you can’t (shouldn’t?) try to read a play unless a) you have an exam on it or b) you are involved in a production. Unwin has convinced me that you can and it’s worthwhile. You just have to remember it’s not a novel and approach it differently.

The other two books on my little pile both come from Methuen Drama and both concern Shakespeare.

When I interviewed Christie Miller and Kenneth Avery-Clark last year, the American Musical Theatre Academy was still at the planning stage. Meeting Miller, AMTA principal, last week for an update I find that 17 students are now over half way through the one-year, full-time course and have just returned from a successful training trip to New York which is part of the package.

Based in studios in Shoreditch, AMTA offers a one-year course in musical theatre. “We neither market it nor see it as a foundation course,” says Miller. “It is meant to take you straight out to work and most of our students, the eldest of whom is 26, have already done higher education at university or specialist training institutions. We find many of them are very strong in dance but need to top up acting and singing skills, for example.”

Miller and AMTA creative director, Avery-Clark (an actor who has just come out of Sweet Charity), who both come from Canada, take the view that Britain is rightly famed for its drama training but that Musical Theatre is an American invention. “That’s why we take the students to Broadway for two weeks and cost that in with the fees as an integral part of the training,” says Miller.

While in New York, the group trained in workshops led by local American professionals each day from 10.00 to 2.00 pm, then enjoyed some free time to explore the city before seeing a Broadway show in the evening. ‘They were given lots of punchy audition advice and told that rather than taking bar or call centre work when jobs aren’t forthcoming they should continuously showcase their own talents by busking, setting up their own companies and generally get themselves noticed by doing what they’re good at,’ recalls Miller, who was delighted with the way the trip went, even down to student attitude and behaviour.

The course ends in July and AMTA is already bringing in directors and others who might identify someone they’d like to see again. “We prefer that way of working to the traditional showcase,” Miller says.

AMTA also offers other courses, including summer schools, and is planning to offer some short free workshops for would-be performers needing help with self-presentation.

Meanwhile auditions for the 2011/12 one-year course are underway and Miller is delighted that enquiries are coming in from all over the developed world - including from Bermuda, Canada, Greece and a surprising number from Mexico.

Last year 19 students began the course. Two have dropped out - one for personal reasons and financial problems led to the other postponing the course for a year. Ten applicants were rejected.

“The way things are going it looks as if we shall double those numbers in our second year,” says Miller, “Although part of our strength is that we’re small and we are certainly never going to be a gigantic machine.”

Here’s a bit of good news for anyone looking for a Master’s degree linking education and culture. Southbank Centre and King’s College London are working together for the first time with the launch of an MA in Education in Arts & Cultural Settings. They claim it is the first of its kind and it’s certainly the first I’ve heard of.

Many people work on educational programmes in arts organisations across the UK and internationally, but until now available professional qualifications have been thin on the ground. Yes, there are dozens of post-graduate degree programmes relating to the arts and cultural sector, but the specific focus on education and the professional needs of arts educators is unusual.

The new programme is a partnership between the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s and the Learning and Participation department at Southbank Centre. Its first students will start — full or part-time — in September.

Teaching will take place both at the College and at Southbank Centre. The programme includes two compulsory modules. The first combines theoretical teaching in informal pedagogies (the ‘internal’ module, to be taught by King’s). The second is the ‘external’ module, based at the Southbank and making use of its extensive experience of running a learning and participation programme.

MA Students will also include a Southbank Centre-based ‘fieldwork’ element in their final dissertation: a report on a small-scale piece of research conducted on one aspect of Southbank Centre’s learning and participation programme.

King’s and Southbank Centre are hoping that this MA will attract people who currently work, or would like to work, in arts organisation-based education. It will explore ideas for designing, teaching and managing education programmes and ways of getting the education and culture sectors to co-operate.

At the launch event on 09 February, Principal of King’s College London, Professor Rick Trainor, said: ‘The development and delivery of this MA speaks to a new and landmark partnership between King’s College and Southbank Centre. We have been physical neighbours for 60 years - and so perhaps it is about time that we are now pooling our expertise around a shared endeavour!’

Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre, added: ‘The UK arts sector has been incredibly successful in engaging audiences through their educational and outreach programmes. We are delighted to be partnering with King’s College to offer students the opportunity to gain first-hand practical experience and develop excellence in this ever-growing and important area for the arts.’

I know dozens and dozens of people working in this field who might - if they have the time and the energy - be drawn to this pretty interesting sounding opportunity and I shall be very interested to hear from anyone already signed up, considering it and/or from participants once it gets going.

• MA Education in Arts & Cultural Settings

I’ve been talking to Professor Anatoly Smeliansky, Head of the Moscow Art Theatre School and Associate Artistic Director of the Moscow Art Theatre. He was in Moscow and I was in Kent so thank goodness for Skype, which allowed me to see him as well as hear him. Quite a privilege. As one drama school principal quipped on Twitter: “OMG! That’s almost like talking to Stanislavski himself!”

Well Stanislavski, of course, died in 1938 having, as Smeliansky pointed out to me, done much of his groundbreaking work, including the founding of Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, in pre-revolutionary Russia. But he continued to work and innovate - still changing his mind on his deathbed - under the Soviet regime to such an extent that he was, in Smeliansky’s words “almost canonised” because “like the Pope in Rome he could do no wrong.”

And that, Smeliansky argues, is no good for drama because it is stultifying. “We have to find ways of building on the legacy of Stanislavski’s ‘method,’ which in Russia we call ‘the system,’ but continuing to experiment using the ideas of Stanislavski’s later followers, such as Michael Chekhov,” he says, adding that “Every teacher has his own key with which to unlock students.” And he has many excellent inspiring teachers at Moscow Theatre Arts School well able to “translate theories of the past and make them contemporary.”

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting Wellington College in Berkshire, the mixed independent school where polymath Dr Anthony Seldon (who also writes acclaimed political biographies and directs plays among much else) is in charge. His staff describe him as a “creative power house” and he’s certainly transformed the arts in general and the drama in particular in the school since his appointment in 2006.

Anyway, more of all this on the training page in The Stage very soon. Meanwhile I want to tell you about one Wellington College initiative here because the deadline is fast approaching and if you’re a young dancer (or the parent of one, perhaps) needing help with training you need to know about this immediately.

Wellington College is running a community dance competition this June. The top prize is a £5,000 bursary for a talented young dancer aged 18 or under. “The drama department wants to make a commitment to help this performer further his or her career — and we want to maintain an ongoing relationship with the eventual winner by supporting them in any way we can,” Sarah Spencer, Head of Drama, tells me.

Interestingly, the money for this bursary has been raised by the drama department through its Community Drama Programme. Among other projects Spencer and her colleagues run Curtain Call, dance and drama classes for local children and teenagers aged 6 and over, on Saturday mornings. The nominal charge for this is £70 per term (with informal subsidy arrangements for those who struggle to pay) but the school provides all the facilities and resources without taking any of the income. For the last four years money thus generated has been used to fund an annual four-day residential summer school for young people from Kids Company.

This year some of the money raised is also being used to fund the dance bursary.

Spencer is keen to stress any dancer aged 18 or under - “Yes, anybody from anywhere” she says, telling me that she has phoned every school for miles - can apply to audition for the dance competition. Auditions are being held in the Wellington Theatre at Wellington College on 26 February. Contact Sarah Spencer SPS@wellingtoncollege.org.uk for more details.

I see - and mostly enjoy and admire - a lot of theatre for very young children and love sharing it with groups of enlightened parents and their (usually) rapt children who ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ and occasionally make perceptive, audible comments which add to the action and make the rest of the audience smile. It will be a long time, before I forget for example, hearing a boy of about two and half loudly singing back - uninvited but welcomed - the three note, four syllable, leitmotiv in Little Angel’s mini opera Skitterbang last year.

So I was delighted to have my attention drawn to Starcatchers, a project which supports theatre for under-4s in Scotland.

During the last week or two I’ve been thinking hard and talking to recipients and providers about why drama, and other performing arts training, really matters. Sure sign that The Stage’s annual Drama Tuition supplement is coming up. Look out for it in next week’s issue (out Thursday, February 10).

The trouble is, these days, that the waters are muddied by X Factor type performers who appear to come from nowhere and simply be able to hold an audience by instinct or knack. Or that’s what the audience is led to think, or wants to think. In fact, of course, this stereotype is almost always false because most winners have done considerable training. Danielle Hope, for example, who is 18 and about to open as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Dorothy, having won TV’s Over The Rainbow, has starred in a whole string of school musicals at her Cheshire school as well as taking part in a professional production of We Will Rock You. She has studied dance privately for years and done A levels in dance and drama at school as well as a BTec National. Untrained she certainly isn’t, although she hasn’t yet done an intensive college course.

“The trouble is,” says Ian Kellgren, Director of NCDT and a very experienced theatre director, “that some people can walk straight into the industry — but it will probably only be a one-off because the person is the right age, build, ethnicity or whatever for that particular role. To sustain a career, you need a complex set of skills and you get that only from training.” He tells me that he has sometimes been expected to work with ‘actors’ who cannot fill an auditorium with sound or work with text. “There is an indisputable difference between a trained actor and an untrained one,” he asserts.

Kirsty Malone, RSMD graduate who has just finished a Dundee Rep tour of Sweney Todd, agrees. “I did a year’s post-graduate training after having done a music degree in London and it was a brilliant way of getting equipped for all aspects of the industry,” she says. She mentions discipline, development of stamina, teamwork and, like Kellgren, refers to that metaphorical toolbox several times.

Sam Pay, quite independently, told me something very similar. He’s a 29 year old graduate of ALRA’s three-year acting BA Hons who did a degree in English and Drama at University of Kent first. He says of the ALRA training “Well, it’s very practical and there’s a lot of emphasis on the really basic things like being punctual and learning your lines - plenty about professionalism. They encouraged me to pick up musical instruments I’d played in the past too such as piano and trumpet. And I started using an accordion too. And the tuition is, in a sense, a series of springboards - a lot of contacts which has led, directly or indirectly, to work since I graduated.”

So there’s another argument in favour of training. Working with tutors, many of whom are also active in the industry, and with the visiting teaching staff good drama schools import to do occasional sessions, is a good way of establishing professional contacts and that all too elusive toe on the ladder once the training is over.

It’s hard, in fact, to see how anyone - in cost cutting governments or anywhere else - can think that training isn’t the bedrock of the performing arts industries. You wouldn’t expect to play as a professional football without training. And you have to train for five years to qualify as even the most junior of doctors. Teachers are expected be trained. So are lawyers. The skills required for performing arts are different, obviously, but no less complex than any of these.

On a completely different note, please do consider voting for John Wright for a green People’s Plaque in Islington. Wright, with his wife Lyndie, founded little Angel Theatre Theatre in the borough 50 years ago this year. An exquisite puppet theatre, it has provided wonder, theatrical magic and learning for children ever since. He died in 1991 and should, in my view, be commemorated.