March 2012 Archives

This is one of those blogs when I tell you disparately about several things. There’s no connection between them so I shall not make any spurious attempt to contrive one. First, there’s a free training opportunity in Dorset on Tuesday April 3rd 10.30am-4.30pm at Lighthouse, Poole. It’s called Drama School for a Day and is an opportunity for any young person (16+) from anywhere in the country to sample the training which Dorset School of Acting (DSA) can offer. Because DSA did this so successfully last year, WAVE arts it is funding it again to offer a free taste of life at drama school.

“We’ll be providing classes in acting, dance, voice and singing with a Q & A session with us at the end,” DSA co-principal Laura Roxburgh tells me. “People who are interested need to contact us direct to book a place on 01202 922675 or email us at admin@dorsetschoolofacting.co.uk. It’s totally free but places are limited.”

Second, at Perform 12 earlier this month I caught up with Philip Short, Course Director at KSA Performing Arts, a school I visited at its Beckenham base about three years ago.

Thanks very much, all you publishers of performing arts training books who keep sending me you latest titles. March has been a bumper month.

For example, I have Rosemary Malague’s An Actress Prepares, (Routledge). Method Acting - rooted in Stanislavski - is, of course much more widely taught in the US than it is in Britain where it tends to be part of range of approaches explored by trainee actors. In most British drama schools and classrooms The Method is not presented as the definitive way of working.

Malague, who directs the Theatre Arts programme at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that in the 90 years in which the Stanislavski method has been extensively taught in the US, very little attention has been paid to the feminist perspective. She also alleges that there is still sexism in American drama training and within The Method. Is she right? It would be interesting to hear the views of actors in work or training.

Although Malgue’s book includes some practical exercises, it is largely an interesting, but academic and theoretical, analysis of the work of US Stanislavski teachers such as Strasberg, Adler, Meisner and Hagen by looking at how their approaches include or exclude women and/or work with them. She is also strong on how these famous practitioners related to each other. Stella Adler, for example, who had what we might now call a feminist subtext, was bitterly resentful of the ‘damage’ done by Lee Strasberg, as she saw it.

Looking for a play to perform?

If you are a teacher or youth theatre leader - or director of an amateur company - how are you going to find a decent, suitable play for your cast to perform? You might, after all, have very specific numbers to accommodate and/or you might want a particular play genre. You may well have other criteria to meet too. How are you going to find your perfect needle in the huge shaggy haystack of published plays?

Enter Nick Hern Books and its new online tool Plays to Perform. NHB is one of the UK’s leading publishers of plays and books about the performing arts. It is also a rights management agency.

Its new tool enables you to search for your ideal play online by applying a range of criteria. I searched, for instance, for a play written after 1945 with a war theme, suitable for performance by a teenage youth group. I ended up with a choice between Kinderstransport by Diane Samuels or David Haig’s My Boy Jack.

Last week I strode through Stratford’s Westfield centre from the misnamed ‘high speed’ train from north Kent. I then picked my way through the pre-Olympics road works and builder’s rubble opposite and made my way through the market to Stratford Circus. It must be one of the oddest approaches to a theatre there is. Of course I’ve seen shows at Theatre Royal Stratford East which is next door, but this was my first visit to Stratford Circus.

I was there to talk to Catherine Kelly from the marketing department and to Creative Arts Education Officer Eliza Williams to find out about the venue’s many and various education projects.

Perform 2012 at Olympia a couple of weeks ago was, as always, a wonderful place to catch up with many industry contacts, friends and colleagues. This time I also led a Stage Events session on funding for training which was a sell out (they had to bring in extra chairs!) although that is another story.

One of the up-sides of a big fair like Perform 12 is that not only do you meet people you know, you also make contact with people you don’t. And they are often imaginative people with entrepreneurial flair such as Rebekah Daven Watson who has recently launched an initiative called The Actors’ Café and it seems to me a very good idea.

It is a mentoring website which offers actors advice and support as they try to develop their careers. Its areas of work are inspiration, marketing, networking and relationships, PR and resources.

First, let me come clean. I am not really ‘into’ pop and know very little about how the popular music industry works. But like everyone else I’d been aware of the Adele phenomenon. And like everyone else, I marvelled at what the down to earth feistiness and astonishing talent of Adele Laurie Blue Adkins had managed to achieve in a very short time.

Then I discovered that she’d been a pupil at the Brit School in Croydon. So when someone put an advance copy of Caroline Sanderson’s biography Someone Like Adele biography in my hand, I read it with my education hat on. Not that I very often take it off.

I’m always intrigued to know how schools work and the marvellous way in which no two schools are ever the same. And the Brit School is a one-off anyway — state funded as a comprehensive school, but sponsored by the record industry and unlike any other comprehensive in the country.

Interestingly, because I wrote about a new scholarship opportunity there only last week and am personally involved in final auditions for Stage scholarships there this week, Sylvia Young Theatre School was Adele’s first choice. But her mother couldn’t afford it so she ended up at the Brit in 2003 - as part of the state education system, it is therefore free.

The Stage has, for many years, supported one full and two half scholarships at Sylvia Young Theatre School every year. I shall, as usual, be attending the final auditions next week, chatting to the finalists and writing an article about it for The Stage, as well, probably, as playing a minor role in the judging process. This is an excellent scheme with which I, and The Stage, are delighted to be associated with.

Now - even better - I am happy to report that, this year, there is an additional, completely separate, scholarship opportunity for yet another talented child to attend SYTS free of charge.

Last week when I visited Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow I had coffee with the lively Alison Forsyth. In past lives she has worked in film, radio and television. She has also done press and PR work for 12 international arts festivals and for several theatres in Scotland.

Forsyth is not an RCS employee (although she trained there some years ago) but is very grateful to it, because she is given office space in the RCS building from which to direct the Scottish Drama Training Network(SDTN), while RCS Vice-Principal Maggie Kinross is SDTN’s Chair.

The network connects all the 25 institutions in the College, the Scottish term for Further Education) and Higher Education sectors which provide drama training. It includes the big names such as RCS, Edinburgh Napier University and Adam Smith College along with others across Scotland that non-Scots are unlikely to have heard of.

Little Angel Theatre, which so often, tiny as it is, manages to break new ground and make things happen, has quietly established a new training opportunity for emerging directors.

Rachel Warr, 37, is Associate Artist at Little Angel for 2012, having last year been artist-in-residence at Middlesex University. The position was quietly established last year with Jonathan Storey in the training seat, so Warr is the second to benefit. The intention now is that Little Angel will appoint an Associate Artist each year and offer him or her continuing professional development, or CPD.

Warr, a theatre director, dramaturg and puppeteer, focuses on the creation of new work either through devising or by working with playwrights. Her first work at Little Angel is The Lonely One, under the auspices of her new company Dotted Line. She tells me it’s set in the 1920s and is very atmospheric with lots of emphasis on light manipulation. You can see it on 29 and 30 March and I’m looking forward to it.

“I’m really thrilled to have this opportunity to learn and develop at Little Angel this year,” she says, adding that sometimes emerging directors struggle to stop emerging and become established, especially if they’re female.

The work and theories of Berthold Brecht loom large in most secondary school drama syllabuses, especially at A level.

So David Byrne, Artistic Director of New Diorama Theatre, wanted to find a new, fresh way of presenting Brecht to school audiences. The result is The Dark Room, radically adapted from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui which you can see at NDT during a two-week run next month from April 10-28.

“We’ve set it in a modern London secondary school, where we join new girl Ruth as she blackmails, climbs and seduces her way to the top,” says Byrne, who wrote the script and co-directs the show with Phil McDonnell.

It’s always a pleasure to see drama school students presenting a complete show on their own turf as opposed to the (usually) strained, contrived agony of the short-bite, end of course showcase elsewhere.

On Monday I saw City of Angels at CSSD after a very pleasant pre-drinks reception where I was made warmly welcome by Gavin Henderson and his staff.

Although City of Angels, which first saw the light of day in 1990, did well in the US (where it won six Tony awards) it is not well known in Britain. It ran at the West End’s Prince of Wales for a few months in 1993, but it hasn’t exactly become repertoire stuff.

And that is a pity because it is a high quality piece — and it’s also ideal for a drama school, because it comfortably accommodates a large cast.

I write about training initiatives every day but it isn’t often that I am directly involved in one. The Stage Events, is a new department at The Stage, formed in the second half of last year under the dynamic leadership of Jo Eames.

Jo and her team have worked long and hard to develop an ongoing series of three-hour how-to training sessions which started last month. Sessions led by children’s casting director Jo Hawes, by The Stage’s Backstage co-editor Barbara Eifler, by casting director Richard Evans and by columnist John ‘Dear John’ Byrne have been ecstatically received. Some have been sold out.

Coming up are How to nail your audition, led by Richard Evans at the Dominion Theatre on March 12, How to nail your acting audition, led by Thomas Hescott at the Dominion on March 26 and How to craft an unbeatable job application led by Barbara Eifler at Theatre Royal Drury Lane on March 28.

And I am leading two during the next month, both focused on training and how to get into the performing arts industries - as you’d expect.

Hard on the heels of Jessica Swale’s 2009 widely respected little book Drama Games for Classrooms and Workshops comes, courtesy of Nick Hern Books a neat companion volume packed full of activities to help the work of teachers, directors and others leading devising activities.

Drama Games for Devising is, in part, an exploration of what we mean by devised theatre and how it works. Always part of what actors did, devising is now a mainstream theatrical activity. As Mike Leigh says in his introduction: “Far from being an anomaly invented in the Swinging Sixties, so-called ‘devised theatre’ is as old as society itself. Millennia before the birth of the literary ‘script’ we can be sure that folk got on their feet and made things up.”