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Showing posts from March, 2009
So the first guest blog is by Emily McGee aged 14 from the oldest group that meet at St Andrews on a Saturday morning My week at yew tree has been pretty good, not saying it isn't usually extremely fantastic, brilliant etc. We just did something different. As usual Yew tree started off with news going around the circle, I told my weekly tale of how my dog likes to trip me over or sit on me while I’m sleeping and then we moved onto getting our new scripts from Sam. We are doing Midsummer Nights Dream, which was one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, so I was a bit excited to do it all. As soon as we all paid up for the scripts, we all sat down and read the first act. Then I suddenly realised... it was all in the original language. I would love to say that I got on with it at a high level of confidence, but I would be lying. Basically, I was like "WHAT?" and started worrying about saying loads of stuff wrong. And then matters got worse, we had to choose what characters we w
I was struck this week by finding myself looking at our workshops and indeed my directing/workshop leading from the outside. Over the last few weeks we have had quite a few new people join us and a number of visitors too…(some from such esteemed institutions as East 15 and the National Theatre) I started to see Yew Tree workshops from their perspective and I realised that because we have become so well established as companies, whether that be The Heights cast, the 17+ group or any of the other groups I run (and I’m pretty certain the same could be said of those that Gemma, Sam and Danny run with assistance from Callum, Rob and Aaron) there are so many traditions involved, so many accepted behaviours, so much tacit understanding that it must be quite a weird place to visit or join. This I think is a positive and negative thing entwined…the fact that we have developed a place that reflects the individuals and community that are part of it is magic as long as we keep adapting so that i

why?

It occurred to me that as Yew Tree Youth Theatre was a place where over 200 people chose to spend their time every week it would be rewarding to capture the thoughts and experiences of some of those people in a way that was a little more developed than the one sentence posts on the forum...entertaining as they are... I mentioned this to other people and some of them agreed... Hence the founding of this... the blog...we'll be letting everyone know how they can post in the very near future...but for now...I hereby launch the Yew Tree Youth Theatre blog... Sarah