What's happening at YTYT

What a whirlwind of a week – finished Remember the Oaks on Sunday on Monday dived into The Hepworth Job.   Which meant I and my lovely cast spent a whole week immersing ourselves in a ridiculous romp where a group of teenagers attempt (unsuccessfully) to steal a priceless piece of art from The Hepworth Gallery.   I enjoyed every minute of it for a myriad of reasons… To start with, what a cast!   Each one a joy…each one entirely committed! Each one of them wonderfully talented and prepared to be bold and brave.   More importantly each one fully engaged in the business of working together and fully aware that magic is made in the relationships within a company and between characters… Another reason is site specific work is my favourite form of making work…to be able to make something that fits in the place where it is performed is such creative happiness.   It gives it an immediacy and an energy that is entirely unique. As a flippant thing but none the less a joy the absence

Hi I’m Helena, I’ve never written a blog post before so this may be choppy but I’ll give it a good go. The Hepworth Job was a weeklong project where basically we were given a script written by Sarah and we had to get together and make a show in a week. Within this week, I met loads of new people, created many friendships and remembered the reason I fell in love with this community at eleven years old... Soppy I know but incredibly true. The one thing that I noticed throughout the past week is the just how powerful theatre is. When you’re in a show and you spend a couple of months having to cast, block, run and perfect it, I think the gravity of what you’re actually creating is sometimes forgotten. Being forced to do this all in a week and trying to still come out with a performance just as high a standard as one in rehearsal for months, really made me realise that theatre is powerful stuff not only for the audience, but for us as an ensemble. When you’re on a mega time limit, you re

You only need to read these blogs reasonably frequently to know that Yew Tree Youth Theatre are almost consequently building up to, in the middle of or recovering from a performance of some description.   This means that I am doing the same… All of these performances are special in some way – they’re all about young people being excellent…but some of them are really very special… Remember the Oaks qualifies as just that…commissioned by the NUM it is a play that tracks the 150 years since 361 miners lost their lives in England’s worst mining disaster.   It’s a play about the community that had to carry on in the midst of all that grief.   It’s a play about how important it is to remember the legacy of a communities past and it’s a play about belonging and hope and integrity.   There’s a little romance, a fair amount of loss and there’s a lot of bravery…it’s a play about the best and worst of persevering through life’s challenges. We performed it yesterday to the most generous o

Emily is our second... So yesterday was Black Company's performance for Remember the Oaks; a play in which we portrayed how the memory of what happened in the Barnsley Mining Disaster 150 years ago has changed through the years and becoming more and more distant, hence why the permanent memorial is being raised for so that the memory lives on. 9:15am on a Sunday morning in Barnsley Lamproom Theatre may not seem the perfect day or time for an intense tech rehearsal however we all came armed, prepared and still slightly tired. To begin the tech run we familiarised ourselves with the stage itself and backstage as there were many hazards such as beams, steps and loose wires to trip over, most of which I managed to bump into at some point during the day... The sculpture was placed at the back of the stage and she is beautiful to say the least. We ran the major physical sequences such as the opening, the miner's strike and our foxtrotting scene (we are now all experts). Then it wa

Becky is our first guest blogger! Yesterday, with the company of a group of people from Yew Tree's Gold company, I had the pleasure of a lovely visit to the Yorkshire sculpture park. Although I am very familiar with the place, it is always a refreshing experience to look at a site with a different group of people. We began the day with a few games: the classic list game, a good ol' game of "ninja" and killer 12; however, unlike the average session of Gold, we were surrounded by the beautiful backdrop of the Sculpture park. Next, it was onto some sight-specific theatre in the "Longside gallery". At first, we took a few minutes to explore the current exhibition, "A night in the museum", which is made up of a range of sculptures that resemble people, placed so they look to gaze at artworks featuring the colour blue, before being split off into small groups. After coming up with either a short narrative about two pieces of artwork or a con

I love the fact that however long you do something for there is always something you can learn about it or simply realize you’ve lost sight of something valuable… As you have probably guessed this week included an example of just such a thing.   We’re in full swing now with rehearsals for Remember the Oaks – the performance is just around the corner.   Until our latest rehearsal I was getting frustrated because despite the hard work of everyone concerned the production was undeniably lacking something.   We’d not made very much progress over the last couple of weeks and I was beginning to worry about whether we were going to get it where we hoped by the deadline of the performance. Remember the Oaks is a complicated show – it spans 150 years – it is inspired by real life events and it will be seen by an audience that includes people whose families were affected by The Oaks mining disaster (a tragedy that still qualifies as England’s worst mining catastrophe)   What’s more, all

The Yew-logy of Bailey D Poching (warning, this blog is littered with in jokes, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, don’t panic, you won’t be alone) Picture the scene. It’s a cold February night, 2015, and we’ve just finished our performance of hacktivists. As a result of post-performance conversations, plans were hatched to bring John Broadhead, Sam mandhi-Ghomi and yes, you guessed it, Bailey Poching to Gold Company the following Saturday. It was questionable as to whether we’d actually see them, but sure enough, come 10 o’clock they were piling in the doors of Wakefield college, and from there their Yew Tree lives began. The summer term was spent devising the Christmas shows, and we saw early that Bailey had a natural ability to bring humour to pretty much any room he walked into. No one was immune to his wit and it was always exciting to watch his work. We moved into the autumn term involving incidents with a very special white t-shirt and swapping jeans at

If YTYT is 21 years old this year…which it is…that means I have been getting up on a Saturday to run workshops (barring school hols and two brief maternity breaks) for the same amount of time.   That’s a lot of weekend early get ups…a lot of working weekends…a lot of (at the very least) 6 day weeks.   However if ever there was a perfect example to illustrate why I’ve done that amount of weekend long service it was this weeks Gold Company session.   Now before I tell you why, you need to know it’s been a long hard summer term.   Anyone involved in education, as a student, parent or teacher will tell you this term has been one of the toughest and in some cases the worst.   This has meant a record amount of absences at YTYT and I don’t blame anyone except the government.   This Saturday the injuries were still being felt and there were a lot of absences…however despite this it couldn’t have been more worth turning out for it…I found myself standing back on a number of

Ysanne is our guest blogger this week After managing to successfully escape writing a blog, I now find myself trying to fit into just one blog post everything I have learnt and experienced this week. I have spent the past week with Sarah (and an afternoon with Gemma) undertaking a work experience placement in which I visited primary schools, a local high school and Sapphire Company. Although I didn’t expect to enjoy the primary school sessions, the experience opened my eyes to just how necessary this first stage of education is for development. My first session within a primary school included me assisting a dance class for Year 4 pupils. The children very much enjoyed the time to release their energy and express themselves in a different and fun way. Despite there being challenges within this session, two boys who I were told usually misbehaved were rewarded with ‘chance cards’ at the end of the class. It was not only pleasant to see the boys rewarded for their hard work and be

This week I’m going to celebrate the little people of Yew Tree Youth Theatre.   Jade and Orange shared their work to their incredibly supportive parents on Wednesday and Thursday respectively and it was a joy to behold.   I try to keep plays for this age short and sweet so that we can still build the key skills of drama.   When they come to their weekly session I want them to be able to play, to develop their vocal skills, their physicality and above all I want them to have a place every week which is entirely creative.   The plays we do are a way of applying those vital elements of the craft of drama and so should be equally joyful and definitely not a stress.   However I acknowledge lots of parents spent quite some time helping their children learn lines which isn’t easy – so much thanks to all that did. The children’s performances were testament to all of this – the way they moved, spoke and told the story demonstrated a genuine freedom and security in themselves and what they

Fi has been on work experience this week and has kindly written a blog! After 8 years at Yew Tree I’ve finally had to write a blog post this week for the first time after spending a week on work experience with Sarah, being in Crimson Company with Gemma we manage to avoid writing on the blog! So I’m going to go over my week of work experience with you which I thoroughly enjoyed. I started my week off very nervous because I’d never worked with Sarah before and didn’t know what to expect but as soon as I arrived at St Michaels Academy on Monday I knew that it was going to be a good week. We spent the afternoon in a dancing lesson with year 4s and I have to say, I was very comfortable just watching with Sarah and helping the teacher with the music but the 8-year-old girls obviously weren’t happy with this and eventually I was dancing along with them to The Ugly Bug Ball. We then went on to Sapphire Company in the evening where I ran a game of Captain Beaky with Olivia, who was doing wor

Being a Princess! By Alice kearford age 8 The night before the show I felt nervous because I was worried about my lines, but then I felt okay at the show because I had learnt my lines. My mum helped me and so did my teacher Sarah, she is very good at her job. I love going to Yew Tree because we get to play games, and do shows although some days I didn’t want to go because I was scared but I went anyway because Sarah encourages me. At the show some of us were scared because of all the adults that were there. Before we did the performance Sarah helped us play games to make everybody smiley and happy about doing the play. Being a princess made me feel happy because I’ve never been given a part like that before with lots of lines. Being a princess was good because it made me feel me! I’ve always wanted to play a princess! At the start of the story the narrator’s introduce the mum, sister and Jack, the mum was ma