What's happening at YTYT

Hannah with her excellent blog about connections week... Sooooo. Connections week. Well it’s been a joy, and now I want to sleep for a very long time. But I can’t because I’ve got to be up at 6.30 on Monday morning to go to college. Rubbish. I was going to work through the days in order, but I can’t because they’ve all melded into one giant Connections day... Well, we were all given an aggression makeover, because in the 17th century, we’re all pretty nasty characters, and we couldn’t be nasty to each other without feeling bad about it. Soooo we played Ratchet, Screwdriver a game that’s been banned at Yew Tree for about 4 years. It’s basically a more extreme version of Master and Servant, but you can restrain your partner in any way you want. Yeah, no idea why it was banned. Everyone loved it, and it sorted out our aggression problems. After that the 17th century cast spent some time working on scene 2, because we’d never got the atmosphere right, but its sooo much better now, and I’m

It’s been quite the week…not only have we worked pretty much full time on our production of Shooting Truth but we were also featured in The Stage and in addition there was an article by me (sounds more self-congratulatory than I intended) published in the National Association of Youth Theatre’s Youth Theatre Now, publication. The one thing I would choose off that list, if I was only able to have one, is the first…it’s been the most creative, challenging, rewarding week spent with some of the most talented young people I have ever met in addition to the most perceptive and brilliant assistant director. The work we have produced has been utterly inspiring and the process of producing it has utterly surpassed inspiring. They’re big words but they’re deserved…there’s something gratifying about accepting a challenge and coming out the other end of it a developed and improved version of the person you were…everyone this week has undergone such an experience… Despite all these achievements

Alice Proctor blogs beautifully about February half term and all it's challenges and rewards... So this week was my fourth ‘Connections Week’. Rehearsing intensively for five days with a cheeky rehearsal still to go on Saturday, there’s been little time for anything else but I’ve absolutely loved it. With no work and no regular youth theatre sessions - which are usually what take up my weeks...and, the advantage this year of not being at college meant I could concentrate fully on ‘Shooting Truth’. I decided I wanted to spend my week feeling like a proper actor...whatever one of those is, ha. I wanted to be independent, healthy, focussed, organised, resilient and disciplined. Of course everyone can say ‘I could have...’ or ‘I should have...’ or ‘What if I’d...’, but this week I feel like I’ve done enough not to have to feel like that. And this is the first connections process where that’s happened. It’s been an absolute pleasuuuuure of a week and the prospect of not getting into dra

Sharing work is always an odd thing, there’s such a strange combination of pride and insecurity. It feels like there’s so much at stake. There are lots of reasons for this but the one that is always upmost in my mind are whether people are going to produce the quality of work I have witnessed they are capable of in rehearsals and this is compounded by my knowledge of the context of each production and the cast members within it. I am made proud of my actors, and the work we produce together, not only on the performance but also on the journey we took to get to it and I’m frustrated by the fact that this isn’t always evident to an outsider. This week I shared my work with the Gold and Green company, I’d written plays/scenes for them and as I prepared to listen to them being read through by the cast I had the same sense of nerves as an actor does just before the show…will the play work? Will people understand it? Will they like it? Will they think it’s rubbish and therefore think I

Aaron had a very good reason to blog this week... Hi yew tree it’s been a while since my last blog so let’s see how this one turns out. I’m sorry to say that the majority of this blog will be a little self indulgent as it involves me taking part in something that I love to do as well as not doing it in such a long but the rest will consist of talk of how the performance went. Improv battle, a phrase that somehow managed to turn me into a 6 year old on Christmas morning, was but one of the events that was part of the youth theatre event at York this weekend that Yew Tree attended. I was a little overwhelmed with excitement to say the least to find out that they wanted volunteers from each youth theatre. I looked at my friends only to see the all familiar look that my mum gave me when she gave in to letting me open a present on Christmas Eve. A look that seems to say ‘What’s he like’ and ‘you’re a little annoying at this moment in time so get on with it’. Safe to say I was the first one

Yesterday at Gold Company it was Dillon’s birthday and as is the well established tradition much cake was consumed and there was much good cheer. As Danny and I watched the company sit in a perfect multilayered circle during their break we commented on how they were almost a storybook perfect group. Anyone who walked in, who hadn’t met them, would have been taken aback by the utter good will, abundant smiles and general delightfulness. It was a vision of just how brilliant a group of young people can be. As we were making this observation they burst into song and sang happy birthday to Dillon just to complete the picture. This isn’t the first time we’ve commented on this. A number of times since the start of the term we’ve looked across at a sea of laughing faces and shared our feelings that sometimes the atmosphere at youth theatre is too good to be true. Obviously nothing is idyllic and I’m aware that everyone in the room is dealing with some challenge or other either within th

Aayushi, like Mel makes her blogging debut...to great effect... Gold Company on a Saturday morning - in all honesty I don't think there's a better way to start the weekend. This week's session, as always, began with Best and Worst which never fails to amuse and after some games we started work on what we're doing with the Wakefield Opera House, changing people's perception of theatre as a whole. We were split into groups depending on what area of the theatre we were interested in and had to devise a short piece. After a cake break thanks to Dillon and more rehearsing, all of us settled to watch the pieces; each of one of them enjoyable and my favourite character definitely being drunk Ed. Our next task was to think of ideas on how to incorporate the audience, what roles would they play? It's amazing really, how the same brief can result in so many different ideas - making the audience act as buyers about to bid on the theatre just to convey to them the value of

Mel tells us about the start of a fantastic project for Gold Company... Well, after starting Yew Tree 3 years ago, this is my first blog and I have never done anything like this before so here we go... Saturday morning sessions are always a pleasure, even after hearing the bests and worst’s of everybody’s week I still always want to say “just being here” is my best. COP OUT I know. And although all the older ones have flown the nest and loads more people have joined it’s still so much fun and such a brilliant company to be a part of. This Saturday Gold has started preparing and devising scenes for “Raised Curtain” to be performed at the Wakefield Theatre Royal and it’s absolutely fabulous. It breaks all the boundaries of what theatre should be like and perceptions will inevitably change after seeing it. Performing anywhere but the stage is not just fun for the actors but for an audience too. They also get a chance to feel like they’re involved in the all of the little pieces of theatre

Ellie reports in on the Black Company's progress on the production they're taking to York... I feel like our physical theatre on the book "princess blankets" deserves the most praise... and as I wasn't at gold company last Saturday it's the most fresh in my mind too. When you read a book that you don't think interests you, you don't take half as much notice, as you would in a book that you have chosen to read. The Princess's Blankets... "A book that show's love from the pure basic's of giving somebody that warm feeling inside, it express's the true meaning of love and reminds the world of what that feeling is." It's always difficult to express the word's from a book when you have said the lines over and over again, but there's something in the pictures that the members of the youth theatre make, that inspire you to say them with meaning and more thoughtfulness. Just saying it louder doesn't make it more meaning

January is done, in some ways it seemed to last a long time however now it’s gone all sorts of things that I thought were a good safe amount of time away now seem mighty close. It occurs to me that Yew Tree Youth Theatre has never been so busy and stretched and equally we’ve never been so vibrant and energized. So I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you for making the Youth theatre an ever developing, shifting, changing, expanding magical entity…I’m saying this now because over the next month or two or three or four I’m going to be making significant demands on you to ensure we hit all the targets we’ve set ourselves…a successful National Connections project, a worthy performance of The Princess’s Blankets, a sensational Alternative Performance Event…and that’s aside from the bag packing, fund raising evening, the blog writing and the weekly sessions…some of these demands are quite insignificant – thinking about your role in between rehearsals, learning lines, assembling c

Danny Southern tells us about: Monday 31st January 2011. What a day. Two pens have exploded in my pocket, my trousers have ripped and I fell down three flights of steps at college. Fun. Even after all that, the ‘curse of clumsiness and calamity’ struck again – this time breaking a mug of a teacher… they don’t know, but they might notice something different when they taste sellotape… oops. But what the hell, Yew Tree was awesome. Surprised I didn’t end up breaking someone’s arm which is always an added bonus. So erm, yeah. Today we kinda made up vegetable stories and rapped about them. I will explain all. Wow, that sounds like a last line from Eastenders before the dum-dum-du-du-du-du-du-dur. Basically, we started with a verb (ya know, a doing word). So being sane and everything, I picked drowning. Then we created an action for it (no surprises for how slack I looked there). We did the same with a veg, and I picked cucumber, which entailed that I just laid on the floor. And finally a co

Michael tells us about this weeks Sapphire session So it's my third blog... Well, monday was interesting, makin' up some tunes :) And I gotta say, for a bunch of people who had only an hour or so to come up with a beat using just their voices, everyone did AMAZE! They did so good I felt the need to write "amaze" in capitals! I did had some favoraites though, shuch as: Leahs Click, clap, snap, urmm... thing... You see, it's so complex it can't even be written down. I also got the pleasure of working with our very own Danny Bell! Never before have I seen such energy in a human being, or such a great sense of humour... I have also just recently read the entire Shooting Truth script and it is brill! I can't wait to see how it looks once we've got it all together! :-D Well that's all from me... Cya :-)

Rhiann kicks off the blogs of this week with an insight into Crimson's session last week Today’s session of Crimson was definitely my favourite of this term. We focused on being able to trust our group members more by doing a series of activities to help us with confidence too. I worked with Chris Marsay on our first task which was to use our hands to control our partner to do little movements but then allow them to return to neutral before doing the next which is called ‘Columbian Hypnosis’. However, when Chris began to control me, I found it easier to have my eyes closed when he made me move my body parts as it allowed me to feel less strict on my movements as I was almost like jelly. I really enjoyed this activity as it made me begin to trust Chris more and more as he wouldn’t make me look stupid. Gemma then asked us to do the same thing of controlling people but by using our eyes to make them change levels but this proved to be a challenge as you couldn’t really determine where