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My thoughts this week have centred on, amongst other things, the demands placed on the participants of my workshops. I’ve always felt a very great responsibility to anyone I’m teaching, directing or training to ensure that the group and each individual within the group feels supported, comfortable and hopefully inspired in some way. However it’s becoming clearer that these values aren’t always compatible and that sometimes, temporarily one has to be sacrificed for another.

The Youth Theatre workshop I faciliated on Thursday night demanded that everyone involve step out of their comfort zones to some extent…nobody, unless they train every day, can whole heartedly surrender to a process like that without some effort. It’s an experience that demands that you give yourself over creatively, mentally and physically to the group, the process and the devising of a piece of theatre. Those more experienced members of Yew Tree have less of a distance to fall but still, fall you must in order to make the most of the opportunity. However in return for taking the step off the precipice however high it is suspended there is a rich, gratifying and meditative experience which is a wonderful reward.

What concerned me this week is that I spent a lot of my time with a group of children who despite not having started secondary school were already locked into behaviours that negated this idea of giving yourself over, were already enmeshed in a culture that fixated on problems and barriers. As I watched my youth theatre play and create on Thursday, entirely absorbed in the moment I was struck and saddened at how much the children I had spent the day with already had to unlearn…

There isn’t a conclusion to this really apart from a joyful hurray for a place to play…to create…to safely surrender to every now and again…

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