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Alex from Gold has contributed this weeks guest blog...
  • There's a saying that goes 'From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.'

    Of course, anyone who has ever spent a reasonable amount of their time at Yew Tree Youth Theatre knows that this is total nonsense. So often there, the ridiculous IS the sublime. At Gold this weekend, after rounds of absolutely mad but absolutely brilliant games of Ninja Warrior, Amoeba and others, we were set a small devising task - a 2 minute scene set in a library in which all lines had to be questions. But groups still managed to include lines like 'Do you need cheaper car insurance?' and 'Can you feel the love tonight?'. All, of course, making perfect sense in the context of these short pieces. Well, almost perfect sense anyway.

    For our main task, we continued, from last week, to be split into two sets, one developing their takes on a Chekhov farce, and another couple of groups working on their own short scenes. The Chekhov piece I was working on, 'The Proposal', is just as ridiculous as anything devised on Saturday mornings at Gold, but brilliant for different reasons - beginning relatively seriously, the dialogue later becomes comical, but even that becomes interrupted by a tendency of the characters to suddenly start dying and then recover all of a sudden. The devised short scenes were great as always, including a bus driver refusing to stop to allow the woman to give birth due to needing to cook a Shepherd's pie. As always, YT this week was so ridiculous. But so sublime.

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