This week at Yew Tree has been quite the week...
It occurs to me that as Yew Tree Youth Theatre gathers momentum and increases in its excellent reputation, one of the knock on effects is that my job gets more and more complicated. I won’t lie the last few days have been ridiculous…rewarding, absorbing, creative yes…but ridiculous…From 6pm Thursday it’s been all about the Youth Theatre…and the thing is most my life is a lot about the youth theatre, but we definitely reached a new saturation point this week…
Thursday saw us finally knock our Young Theatre Makers piece into shape with the artistic direction of Richard from Invisible Flock…which was good timing as the next day we were scheduled to tech it at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Now we have quite the reputation there for being professional and all round brilliant youth theatreness after our performance of The Heights so I wanted to make sure we upheld that. I needn’t have worried…despite the relative technical complexity of the show and the finite nature of the time we had to get it done it was relatively painless. Much credit has to be given to you as actors for that…all weekend from so many different people I have been told how professional you are and how talented and how brilliant…and how yadada yadada…it’s true though you are…
But Young Theatre Makers wasn’t the only accomplishment we had to achieve this weekend …I was also engineering another performance too for St George’s Community Centre…Oh my word…for something that should have been ssoooooo simple it turned out to be quite the challenge…when I came up with the idea in answer to their request I imagined a simple transference of some of the portable scenes form the Classics festival…I hadn’t imagined quite so many performers having to tell me they were unable to make it with quite such short notice…despite all of this we managed to pull something lovely together and be assured that this performance was as important as what was perceived as the main event at the playhouse…we performed in our own community to an audience who don’t have access to theatre…introducing them to culture in the real sense and the actors did it with talent and commitment…I was more than proud of the cast…many of whom had stepped in roles at the last minute…
Once this performance was done we hotfooted it to gold, with the help of some brilliant parents to whom I’m indebted, to begin work on the Christmas show…I realised after this workshop that Sleeping Beauty is one of my favourite fairy tales and I am very excited about it. The devising we did certainly got the process off to a good start with a mixture of dark twistiness and ridiculousness (I doubt anyone there will be able to forget Dillon’s performance for a while.)
Then it was Playhouse time once more…the dress which I had sadly missed as I was at another rehearsal was said to have gone well – the curtain call was choreographed and we were ready for the performance. In actuality one of the best things about the YTM project was seeing the other companies work. It was all innovative, honest and brave…and it was all of a high standard…even when creative decisions had been made in a different way to that you might have chosen you could see that the intention was to make an sincere and effective piece of theatre. The evening was a triumph of Youth Theatre…of the highest standard…the audience laughed and cried, empathised and contemplated…it was theatre at it’s best…
And in amongst that I directed a group of young people for First Floor in Leeds and wrote a couple of scenes of the Nostell Play…I think I might have even talked to my family a couple of times…craziness…so today I’m going to clean the house and then go with my family that I have hardly seen the last few days to a picnic…what a happy prospect…and then this evening, I reckon despite my best intentions to have a non Yew Tree Youth Theatre day, I’ll be found writing scene 5 of “Duel” lucky for me that all things Youth Theatre make me the happiest person…
Thursday saw us finally knock our Young Theatre Makers piece into shape with the artistic direction of Richard from Invisible Flock…which was good timing as the next day we were scheduled to tech it at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Now we have quite the reputation there for being professional and all round brilliant youth theatreness after our performance of The Heights so I wanted to make sure we upheld that. I needn’t have worried…despite the relative technical complexity of the show and the finite nature of the time we had to get it done it was relatively painless. Much credit has to be given to you as actors for that…all weekend from so many different people I have been told how professional you are and how talented and how brilliant…and how yadada yadada…it’s true though you are…
But Young Theatre Makers wasn’t the only accomplishment we had to achieve this weekend …I was also engineering another performance too for St George’s Community Centre…Oh my word…for something that should have been ssoooooo simple it turned out to be quite the challenge…when I came up with the idea in answer to their request I imagined a simple transference of some of the portable scenes form the Classics festival…I hadn’t imagined quite so many performers having to tell me they were unable to make it with quite such short notice…despite all of this we managed to pull something lovely together and be assured that this performance was as important as what was perceived as the main event at the playhouse…we performed in our own community to an audience who don’t have access to theatre…introducing them to culture in the real sense and the actors did it with talent and commitment…I was more than proud of the cast…many of whom had stepped in roles at the last minute…
Once this performance was done we hotfooted it to gold, with the help of some brilliant parents to whom I’m indebted, to begin work on the Christmas show…I realised after this workshop that Sleeping Beauty is one of my favourite fairy tales and I am very excited about it. The devising we did certainly got the process off to a good start with a mixture of dark twistiness and ridiculousness (I doubt anyone there will be able to forget Dillon’s performance for a while.)
Then it was Playhouse time once more…the dress which I had sadly missed as I was at another rehearsal was said to have gone well – the curtain call was choreographed and we were ready for the performance. In actuality one of the best things about the YTM project was seeing the other companies work. It was all innovative, honest and brave…and it was all of a high standard…even when creative decisions had been made in a different way to that you might have chosen you could see that the intention was to make an sincere and effective piece of theatre. The evening was a triumph of Youth Theatre…of the highest standard…the audience laughed and cried, empathised and contemplated…it was theatre at it’s best…
And in amongst that I directed a group of young people for First Floor in Leeds and wrote a couple of scenes of the Nostell Play…I think I might have even talked to my family a couple of times…craziness…so today I’m going to clean the house and then go with my family that I have hardly seen the last few days to a picnic…what a happy prospect…and then this evening, I reckon despite my best intentions to have a non Yew Tree Youth Theatre day, I’ll be found writing scene 5 of “Duel” lucky for me that all things Youth Theatre make me the happiest person…
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