June 2012 Archives

If you like folk music and other folky things - or need to hone skills for professional reasons - then there are some good training opportunities on offer in Somerset.

Halsway Manor is a lovely old manor house in the heart of the Quantock Hills in West Somerset. It was set up as a charity and a folk centre in 1965 and puts on a year round programme of residential courses, events and activities to get people involved in folk dance, music, song, storytelling and arts and crafts. It has a large folk library in a 16th century panelled room. The food and accommodation are great, it has a bar, and lots of parking, lovely gardens and the staff are friendly and helpful.

I have a particular affection for it because my folk fiddler father Ken Hillyer (who would have been 90 this week) was often involved in courses and events there in the late 1960s and 70s.

I had a lovely, unseasonally sunny experience on Sunday evening when I caught Oddsocks’s touring production of Julius Caesar in the delightful Valentines Park in Ilford — one of London’s many well-kept secrets. And I don’t think I’ve laughed so much at a show since One Man Two Guvnors.

Andy Barrow co-founded Derby-based Oddsocks in 1989 with his wife Elli Mackenzie. He directs the shows and on this occasion plays Brutus. Barrow’s account of this great assassination story which changed the course of history is about as serious as The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe to which, come to think of it, it owes quite a lot.

Think Horrible Histories meets Reduced Shakespeare Company meets Propeller’s ‘pocket’ versions spiced with plenty of panto and more than a nod to Carry On Cleo, complete with hilarious asides and visual puns. There’s even a whiff of Avenue Q with a couple of life-sized puppets to enlarge the cast. It’s a highly entertaining cocktail.

This week sees the opening of Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s musical Chaplin. Following GSMD’s recent European premiere of Ned Rorem’s opera Our Town, it’s an interesting choice for a conservatoire show because, although it has been produced in the UK before, this is Chaplin’s first outing in London.

Chaplin, which won the Carbonell Award, is based on the early life of “The Funniest Man in the World.” It depicts Charlie Chaplin’s journey from English music halls to Hollywood.

Here’s an interesting training idea. If you think your music teacher has to be physically beside you, think again.

Aldeburgh Music is the body behind the 65 year old annual Aldeburgh Festival, founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in the Suffolk town they lived in and loved. It has an ongoing strategy to promote high end professional development to young artists from all over the globe, regardless of their background and location. Hence Aldeburgh World Orchestra a new venture for 2012, which is playing at the Proms in London on July 29.

Rebecca Gilliver is principal cellist of the London Symphony Orchestra. She is a also a regular cello tutor at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, having worked with the Britten-Pears Orchestra cello section in 2010 and 2011. She returns to Aldeburgh Music next month to mentor and work with the cello section of the Aldeburgh World Orchestra. And that includes a lesson on Wednesday this week with AWO cellist, Marcellino Safwat. He was in Cairo. She was in Britain using Aldeburgh Music’s remote working suite.

Two events today — 200 miles or so apart — use literature and theatre to help children learn.

First there’s a performance of Tim’s Crouch’s I, Cinna (The Poet) at the Swan in Stratford. The third of just four performances, today’s is open to the press so I’m particularly sorry not to be there having previously seen and admired Crouch’s I, Caliban and I, Peaseblossom. Each piece takes a minor character and explores the relevant play from his or her perspective. It makes for a playful, entertaining, imaginative critique on, or introduction to, the play.

Crouch was asked by the RSC to suggest other characters who would respond to this treatment along with his earlier I, Malvolio and I, Banquo.

“For the first time in this series, however, I would not be performing in the play I would write.” Crouch said. “I would direct but I wouldn’t act. The actor for my Cinna would also be playing Cinna in Gregory Doran’s RSC’s production of Julius Caesar which opened on 6 June and is broadcast on BBC Four later this month. When I was casting alongside Doran, we found effortless consensus over a young actor called Jude Owusu. Jude would be Cinna for us both.”

The production has been imaginatively filmed, so that it takes on an interactive dimension. The filmed version will be streamed into schools on Monday July 2 and there’s a good education website relating to the show. There is only one more live performance of I, Cinna (The Poet), in the Swan after today, on July 6 — although this play will undoubtedly live on as Crouch’s other four Shakespeare-inspired pieces have. I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban are, for example currently touring in North Somerset.

Last week I visited the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) to meet the principal, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, and the eminent and talented people - including the wonderful Mary Hammond - who founded and run the post-graduate course in Musical Theatre - of which more soon in The Stage.

Freeman-Attwood is telling me about the Sir Jack Lyons Theatre at the back of the building which he describes as ” a bit like a 1970s conference or lecture theatre.” He’s right. I gave a talk in there once to the Association of Teachers of Singing at a weekend conference and it wasn’t great. I also saw Brundibar there when Chethams School did it as an education outreach project. The venue’s inadequacies are clear.

In short, as Freeman-Attwood says, it is no longer fit for purpose.

On Wednesday I attended Half Moon Young People’s Theatre Exchange for Change conference.

The theme this year was ways in which Centres of Learning, predominantly higher education institutions, can or should work with theatre for young audiences (TYA) or young people’s theatre (YPT) and to discuss questions about the extent to which these links are already well established.

To that end we saw two interesting and enjoyable pieces of young people’s theatre performed by Rose Bruford students. The first was an extract from a two-hander called How High which the college has developed with support from the London Borough of Bexley to tour to its primary schools.

The second was an accomplished piece called Scrub a Dub (above), featuring 12 of Rose Bruford’s talented actor musicians and devised by them with inspiration from the primary schools they visited during the play’s genesis. The project has been a close collaboration between Rose Bruford and Half Moon and children from one of Half Moon’s local primary schools. Arnhem Wharf came to see it with the conference delegates. It meant we could observe their enthusiastic reactions. The play was directed by Half Moon’s Chris Elwell, assisted by Rose Bruford MA student Nicola Dereham and supported by Rose Bruford’s technical theatre students.

Various recent bits of training developments and events include a new opportunity to train for two years in New York City at a cost of $US 13,000 per year.

Tom Todoroff, who has studios in ten cities and five countries, will open his new Two-Year Conservatory (in the training school sense, of course, rather than a hothouse for plants) in New York City this September. Actors train for two 32-week periods, beginning mid-September and ending in Mid-May, for an average of four hours per day, five days a week. “By design, this schedule allows for rehearsal outside of class and artistic research, including museum exhibits, Broadway and Off-Broadway shows,” a spokeswoman says.

Auditions are being held now worldwide - audition fee $US 40. Student Visas are available to qualified applicants who apply and audition no later than June 20th, 2012 so their Student Visa materials may be processed by the June 25th due date.

Any A level or undergraduate theatre studies student who’d been shadowing me for the last week or so would have got a wonderful and highly educative taste of theatre in all its infinite variety.

First up was Race Horse Company’s Petit Mal, produced by Crying Out Loud. I saw the show at Straford Circus last week although it also did a short UK tour in 2011.

Three astonishingly talented men perform “circus for the next generation” - in a dark, untidy garage. It’s a blend of breathtaking acrobatics, trampoline, pole work, combat, dance, acting and edgy cartoon-style comedy. It’s the sort of show which brings audible incredulous gasps from the audience. And those hypothetical students would have learned a lot from the atmospheric lighting (by Juho Rahijaravi) and from the quirky sound (by Tuomas Norvio and Maksim Komaro).

And still they come. Sometimes I think I shall disappear under the weight of performing arts/training books, the vast majority of them interesting and useful, which arrive in my office and clamour for attention.

Take the new Arden Shakespeare edition of Romeo and Juliet, edited by Rene Weis which publishes on July 15. Part of the third Arden series, now nearing completion, this volume is fatter and more comprehensive, but arguably less obscure and esoteric, than Arden editions used to be. Weis’s introduction includes detailed discussion of the play’s language, and its critical, stage and film history including West Side Story and various film versions. The text is accompanied by clear helpful footnotes.

Two unrelated items of training news - both positive developments - have just reached me.

First comes the announcement that London based Corona Theatre School is due to relaunch in September 2012 from its new home in Hampton, Middlesex. It’s a full-time school at which 11-16 year olds will get a complete education with strong emphasis on the performing arts.

In the past CTS trained people such as Dennis Waterman, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Ray Winstone, but in recent years the recession has driven it into the doldrums and near closure.

Now it has “a generous grant from a private investor” and a new “alliance” with International Collective (INC), parent company to the commercial dance agency, Dancers Inc.

INC Director, Christopher Manoe, has promised that the reborn school will have a redesigned timetable, logo and school uniform and be relevant to today’s industry. Phone 0208 941 2659 or email pililopez@coronatheatreschool.com if you want more details about audition arrangements etc.

Grandpa in my Pocket is a successful TV sitcom show for children (BBC CBeebies), based on the time-honoured Tom Thumb idea that Jason’s Grandpa can shrink. Then all sorts of imaginative excitement and confusion ensue.

It has now arrived in the world of theatre and it isn’t exactly your usual “big kids brand does arena show” approach. Nottingham Playhouse has commissioned it. Due to open on July 13, it will play for a month at Nottingham and the plan is that it will tour next year. The director is Rosamunde Hutt and Kate Edgar is Musical Director.

Jan Page and Mellie Buse, who wrote and produced the TV version, have written the adaptation themselves. “We’ve workshopped it with Ros, the designer, the puppetry consultant and a group of actors which has made it a very collaborative and joyous,” Buse tells me.

So how do you go about taking a children’s TV sitcom that relies so much on special effects, animation and “television” magic, and move it to the stage, while retaining the storytelling strength, key themes, and charm of the original concept?

“Wherever an idea originated — whether that be in a book, on a TV programme, a film, or even a computer game, you shouldn’t set out to try to replicate the original on the stage,” says Buse. “If you simply try to lift a sitcom into a theatre it would offer the audience no more than the television show. In fact, it would offer less because it would be the same, but not the same. It would lack the magic of the original and give up no magic of its own.”

She continues: “A theatrical manifestation must give its audience something different. Every medium should do what that medium does best. That way you extend the creative experience for a child.”

So Buse and her colleagues began by looking at the key themes of the Grandpa concept — the playful Grandpa/Grandchild relationship. Their Grandpa-for-theatre is a “magic” character whose “shrinking cap” reduces him to the size of a coffee cup.

“The beauty of the theatre,” says Buse “is that it’s a place where the imagination knows no bounds. You can take an idea anywhere on the stage, whereas with a television sit-com you’re restricted to a few sets and locations. So a theatre show offers us the opportunity to tell a “Grandpa” story that we could never tell on television because of the constraints. The magic is still there, but it’s theatrical magic.”

That is why the whole of the stage show is set in the world of play and “let’s pretend.” It is intended to tap into the way children do role play. It uses an ensemble storytelling technique with song, dance, physicality, puppetry and real interaction with the audience, who are invited to help to tell the story.

“We hope children will go home fired up and act out their own Grandpa stories. We want them to be proactive. The television show is, after all, by dint of it being television, quite a passive experience,” says Buse.

A very large book has landed with a huge and happy thud on my desk. And when you see the title you realise why it could hardly be a pocket-sized paperback. The history of western music is an enormous subject and all credit to authors Richard Taruskin and Christopher H Gibbs for managing to pack so much that is so useful and interesting into a single volume.

The Oxford History of Western Music is in fact a reduced version of the earlier six volume work by the same authors, but there’s a free companion website and a CD (available separately for instructors) to make sure that users don’t miss out on much.

The 1200 page book is chronological. It takes the student from the earliest written Western music - the Gregorian Chant - to post Millennium developments. It is clearly aimed at serious music students. The text - uncompromising but accessible - is punctuated with helpful short summaries of what has gone before. Each section ends with a set of study questions and a list of key terms.

There is an assumption that the user is a music reader, although there is plenty of information here which is perfectly accessible even to those who cannot read or respond to the musical quotations. And it’s beautifully written with statements such as “History, language and melody made Russian opera the genre that best suited impressive nationalist statements” or “For a Romantic reactionary like Wagner, the very incarnation of corrupted Modernity was the figure of the emancipated, assimilated, urbanized Jew.”

For someone like me who is very interested in classical music, but who has never studied it academically (Graded violin exams and Grade V theory hardly count!) the chapter headings are a revelation too. We get, for example, a whole long section on literary musicians such as Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann who all, sometimes, used great drama as inspiration — plenty there of interest to actors. Then there are sections on Slavik Harmony and Disharmony, Modernism in France, and changes in the 1960s and 70s. I really learned from the way the authors include social context. And the glossary is outstanding.

All in all, this book is a magnificent achievement of extraordinary breadth. I usually pass on review copies because I simply can’t accommodate more than the 5,000 or so books I already own. But this one is staying right here - on a (strong) shelf near my desk because I know, I shall want to refer to it. Often.