Legacy of the landscape...

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Every year for the past four Yew Tree Youth Theatre have had the honour of performing in the NUM Yorkshire’s Miners Memorial service.  Today was the date for the 2012 event and so 16 of us, aged between 7 and much, much older headed out to Doncaster to the Minster…that big ornate building near the bridge that takes you into the town. 

Preparing the play is a unique experience for myself and Gemma as writers and directors and for the cast as performers.  We take real events from relatively recent history, events that are tragic, poignant and hard hitting.  We then turn them into a piece of theatre to show to an audience who have been directly touched by the incidents in the play or others like them.  Our aim is to tell stories from the world of Yorkshire mining with sensitivity and empathy.  We also want to create through theatre a reflection of the strength and solidarity of the mining community…a community that has worked hard and battled through for generations…a community that has supported it’s own through times of abject hardship…a community that has lived a life that many of us could never imagine…

Today, as is the case every year, I was entirely humbled by our audience who in the midst of their grief had the strength to celebrate the industry that took their loved ones from them.  Equally they had the generosity to praise and appreciate the young actors that offered their play to them as a tribute to the men and women who had died as a result of their work in the mines…

The service is important, the performance is important but possibly the most important thing is the chance to reconnect with a legacy that is an intrinsic part of the landscape of Yorkshire…one thing is for sure it is always a day I will never forget…

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