Education and Training

Stay at secondary school for a year's training

2012-05-16T09:30:00Z

Last week I saw, and enjoyed, Bridge Theatre Company’s production of Something for the Winter, by Deborah Gearing. It was my first visit to Southwark Playhouse too, so that was memorable as well.

The Bridge Theatre Company comprises a group of 18 and 19 year old actors who have trained at the BRIT school for Performing Arts and Technology, Croydon.

They work for a year with theatre professionals on a single production which tours to venues and festivals during the spring and summer.

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Maestro conducts Mahler with students

2012-05-14T09:35:14Z

On Friday I went to Dukes Hall at the Royal Academy of Music — surely one of the prettiest concert halls in London with its amber and cream decor, chandeliers and oil paintings, not to mention the splendid acoustic.

My purpose was to watch the internationally celebrated Semyon Bychkov rehearse the Academy Concert Orchestra and the work was Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I walked into the hall to the rich sounds of the fourth movement, the adagietto which has become so well known and popular since Visconti’s film Death in Venice and that unforgettable Dirk Bogarde moment.

But of course there are five movements in this marathon of a symphony which takes nearly an hour to play.

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Drama teacher forms company with former students

2012-05-11T09:30:00Z

It’s pretty unusual to find an acclaimed company of young graduates who first worked together while they were at school and which is now directed by their drama teacher. But that’s how Idle Motion came about. Lyn Gardner of The Guardian described its 2010 show, The Vanishing Horizon, as ‘a little jewel of a show … propelled by real ingenuity.’ My Stage colleague, Lauren Paxman who saw in it Edinburgh deemed it ‘one of the Fringe’s most beautiful, accomplished and innovative physical theatre pieces.’

Paul Slater teaches drama at The Cherwell School in Oxford where the group he refers to as “the girls” were students. Five years ago he took Red Demon, a school student show, to Edinburgh, having raised the money separately so that none of the students had to pay and the experience was totally inclusive. He asked ex-student Kate Stanley, then just coming to the end of the first year of her drama degree at Exeter University, to go with the show as stage manager.

“Standing one day on Waverley Bridge in the rain Kate said that the whole thing had been such fun that we ought to form a company with a few more former students. That was the genesis of Idle Motion.” says Slater who is ten years older than the girls.

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Snow White with a difference

2012-05-09T12:10:00Z

Last year I attended a work in progress performance by Filkskit Theatre at New Diorama Theatre where they were completing a research and development week.

I wrote a blog about it the time in which I opined “it’s very encouraging to see young actors founding their own company and creating some truly original, fine quality work.”

Earlier this week the finished version of Snow White played for three Brighton Fringe performances at The Warren - a delightful new venue in the middle of the city, complete with a magical secret garden frequented by greenfinches.

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Learning to write theatre reviews

2012-05-07T09:30:00Z

Last week I judged a school student theatre review competition.

It was run by a company which specialises in high quality issues-inspired plays performed mostly in secondary schools. The company had invited teenagers who’d seen a specific production to submit a review for the competition. I was asked to judge from a final shortlist of five.

It was an interesting task which left me reflecting on how reviews should be written — and how you learn to do them.

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Learn your musical theatre history with the Astaires

2012-05-04T09:45:00Z

Everybody knows about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the great show biz partnership of the 20th century. Far fewer people know, or remember, that Fred Astaire made his name by dancing with his sister Adele until she married Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire in 1932.

Kathleen Riley’s book The Astaires: Fred and Adele, which publishes later this month, tells the story of their development as children and astonishingly successful stage career together, both in the US and in Britain. “The thing that distinguished the Astaires as dancers and as a unified stage presence was sheer likeability, and an almost tangible sense of delight in what they were doing,” observes Riley.

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Observing a voice class

2012-05-02T11:30:00Z

Last week I sat in on a substantial chunk of a voice class at Manchester School of Theatre and found it quite an eye (and ear) opener.

Often when I visit a drama school I am lengthily shown round the building and only get into classes very briefly to say “hello”. That’s always interesting, of course, although I have to say that one drama/dance studio can look very much like another. And I have admired and politely waxed lyrical about hundreds of them in my time.

So it was a welcome - and very enlightening - luxury to observe in a classroom for long enough to find out what the learning is really about.

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Central students to run 7th Round House festival

2012-04-30T09:30:00Z

On Friday I mentioned next month’s TakeOver Festival at York Theatre Royal in which a group of under 26 year olds do just that — take over the theatre for three weeks.

Here’s another example of a similar learning experience in London.

From May 31 to June 3 — which means it could be something to do over the part of the long Jubilee weekend if you’re looking for shows to see — students of Central School of Speech & Drama and their mentors are to mount the Accidental Festival at the Round House. This is the Festival’s 7th year.

The Accidental Festival, which is commendably international, is devised by the 21 students on Central’s BA Theatre Practice: Performance Arts course acting as producers.

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Evan Placey's Scarberia to take over York Theatre Royal

2012-04-27T16:00:00Z

Earlier this week I blogged about Evan Placey’s play Holloway Jones, produced by Synergy Theatre Project, with which he has won Theatre Centre’s 2012 Brian Way award.

Now I understand from Forward Theatre Project, an associate company of Paines Plough, that Placey has another play, Scarberia, coming up next month (May 24-June 2) at York Theatre Royal. It is part of the rather inspired TakeOver Festival, now in its third year.

TakeOver is a scheme in which every role at York Theatre Royal is taken over by young people under 26 years old who are then mentored by their equivalent staff member. The outcome is a three week youth-run arts festival.

This year Forward Theatre Project has collaborated with TakeOver to run a residency through which they have created a new piece of theatre specifically for an under 26 audience in York - Placey’s Scarberia.

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Greeks reach Unicorn

2012-04-25T09:45:00Z

A few weeks ago I was grumpily alleging — mostly via Twitter — that, under its new director, Purni Morell, Unicorn Theatre was about to sell seriously short the young audiences for which it was created.

Well, I was wrong. And I apologise both to Morell and to her colleagues at Unicorn for saying otherwise.

I was, for example, pretty taken, a couple of weeks ago with The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth — Unicorn at its scary, heart-warming, thoughtful, empathetic best for primary school age children.

Since then, Hull Truck’s touring production of DNA by Dennis Kelly for ages 12+, which I have not seen, runs at Unicorn until this Saturday and seems to have gone very well. My colleague Aleks Sierz, who reviewed it for [The Stage] http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/35158/dna) at The Rose, Kingston in February certainly found it enjoyable.

And now, opening next week, there’s a Greeks season. Quite an original idea for a children’s theatre.

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Well done Evan Placey, Synergy and Theatre Centre

2012-04-23T09:30:00Z

On Thursday I attended Theatre Centre’s Brian Way Award presentation. Last year I was one of the judges, so I feel a real affinity with this splendid prize, which is awarded to the best play for children and young people professionally produced or commissioned and performed in 2011-2012.

I was thrilled about the winning entry too — although, of course all five shortlisted plays were worthy contenders.

Evan Placey (above right) won the 2012 Brian Way Award for his play Holloway Jones commissioned by Synergy Theatre Project. Last year’s winner Keith Saha (above left, with Theatre Centre’s artistic director Natalie Wilson) presented him with a cheque for £6,000 at the Shoreditch Town Hall, London where the ceremony took place.

I sat in on a rehearsal for Holloway Jones last year at Riverside Studios where Synergy is based. In a feature for The Stage I looked at the company’s marvellous, ground breaking work in prisons and with recently released prisoners - some of whom were involved with the Holloway Jones production which then played at Unicorn Theatre. I met Evan Placey and the cast too, and interviewed Synergy’s director Esther Baker, who also directed Holloway Jones, in depth for Teaching Drama magazine.

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Classical lessons

2012-04-18T09:45:00Z

It’s been a bit of a week for classical music education.

First, not quite my usual thing, on Monday I went to London’s best known gay nightclub, Heaven, for a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by RC Theatre Productions. And it was certainly an education for me.

The marvellous thing about this gay revamp of Don Giovanni is that at the heart of the 1980s story and promenade, unseated (I played the dignity card and got allocated one on a balcony) audience is a 10 piece live classical band under Colin Pettet and Mozart’s sublime music. What an inspired way of bringing opera to new audiences. People present seemed to be a healthy, if incongruous mix, if I may stereotype for a moment, of earnest opera buffs and night clubbers.

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What makes a good vocational training school?

2012-04-18T09:30:00Z

I am often asked — face to face, by email or letter, via Twitter — how innocents new to the world of performing arts training can tell the difference between a good vocational training provider and a rip-off. It is a matter which alarms most perspective students and, of course, their supportive but anxious parents.

So, if you want to be “industry ready” at the end of your training here is a checklist of six questions to ask and points to bear in mind which might help and save you some expensive mistakes.

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Slick, sinister learning at New Diorama

2012-04-16T09:30:00Z

Last week I had the pleasure - and it really was - of seeing the New Diorama’s first in-house production. The Dark Room is a sinister, funny 21st century reworking of — really a response to — Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Aturo Ui.

Written and directed by David Byrne, artistic director at New Diorama, this satire on dictatorship and the rise of Hitler is set in a modern comprehensive school.

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Opportunities for 9-12 year old singers at Royal Opera House

2012-04-13T09:30:00Z

Last year the Royal Opera House launched its first Youth Opera Company. It made its debut in May last year in a specially commissioned new work called Beginners by composer Richard Taylor and librettist Jane Buckler. There was also a newly devised piece that included a number of opera choruses written for young voices. Drowning in Imagination was created by Karen Gillingham and Suzi Zumpe and arranged by Richard Taylor. The Company was led by co-artistic directors David Stevenson and Karen Gillingham and vocal director Suzi Zumpe and their performance was conducted by Steven Moore, a former member of the Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists Programme.

Now, the company is about to perform on the main stage as a children’s chorus in La Bohème which opens on April 30. My colleague, Nick Smurthwaite, wrote a detailed feature about this in last week’s The Stage (April 5, page 14), having dropped in on a rehearsal.

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