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I am both very happy and very sad as I sit in my chair this evening…Happy because both Journey to X and Encounters have been a success, happy because all the hard work everyone has invested in them has paid off, happy because so many people generously took time out of their lives and travelled a ridiculous distance to come and see them and happy because the amount of lovely things that have been said about our work are enough to overcome any amount of fatigue.   It’s been a brilliant week, hard work but brilliant. However I’ve also got post show sadness and because both Encounters and Journey to X are over it’s double the sadness.   I shall miss so much about both the shows.   It’s like finishing an excellent book…I feel I know both sets of characters so well they’ve become familiar friends and now I have to live without them, at least for a while. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take tonight to wallow in that, wallow and appreciate it.   There’s ...

The last higher education blog for a while...from Tom McNulty My path through higher education has been a little different to the one people normally might choose to follow if they wished to work in the performing arts industry, study for an acting/directing/stage management course or attend a well respected and professional drama school somewhere in London, for example…Although my career ambitions, plans or as others would see them as “dreams”, still remain the same as they have changed over the last 5 years or so. My choice for how I wanted to achieve the right level of training, study, experience and knowledge of said craft and industry, I feel isn’t at all different to what you might get at LAMDA or RADA (granted they are professional institutions that have funding and the highest level of training anyone would wish to receive)…Because of the path I had taken the last few years in order to gain my current qualifications and degree, any kind of decision of where to study, how to s...

Tom helped me put with a blog today... Sooooooooooo, my yew tree blog … Well I’ve done so much Yew Tree related stuff this week that it’s kind of hard to remember what happened. We kicked off the week with a great (as ever) Sapphire session in which we were doing physical theatre. We started of with some games and then started on some techniques. First of these was blind leading. I’ve always enjoyed being led because I trust everyone in that group and that means I can totally relax and enjoy being led. Even when my mum aka Sarah came over to lead me really fast because supposedly I was being cocky!!! Then we did a review of the task and moved on. We then did pebbles on the beach. We did 3 different versions one normal one, one school related and one based on fight. My fave was defo the fight one. I’m just that kind of guy I reckon. Oh I almost forgot. How silly of me. We had a V.I.P visit from the one and only Jack Iredale. He gave us loads of great advice. When we had done that we d...

I realised I hadn't put up this weeks Higher Education blog...sorry this one's by: Caroline Collier University of Nottingham 2006 – 2009 English Studies (Theatre Studies, English Literature, English Language and Medieval Studies) I really enjoyed my course at University. I wanted a course that was diverse and with which I could explore English and Drama in more depth. Each section was weighted equally; there wasn’t more emphasis put on literature about the other 3 areas. I found that, to my surprise, language was my strong point and now I’m living in Italy as an English Language Teacher!   I didn’t want to do a straight Drama degree so this course was perfect for me. The Theatre aspect of the course involved some performance but also analysis of scripts and live theatre. In the third year you had more freedom about what you studied; in each area you could pick a few modules. For Theatre Studies my modules were 20th century plays and Riotous Performance but for English Languag...

Connections week is such a highlight of my year for a whole heap of reasons but one of the main ones is that the intensive nature of it means that there is a tangible and significant journey made during a short amount of time.   The production we have on the Friday bears very little resemblance to what we started with on Monday…the rough cut approximation of the script becomes a developed entity with a shape and a story and a true sense of what it’s about.   It’s a joyous thing indeed… One of the major developments that occurs is in the realm of characters…I’m fascinated by how actors gradually, imperceptibly at first and then with increasing pace and confidence, lose their own idiosyncrasies, their persona’s, their world view…until we stop watching familiar youth theatre members and watch instead the inhabitants of the world of the play.   It’s really hard to pin down what exactly is responsible for this shift…it’s to do with physicality and voice, it’s to ...

Jack and James L teamed up to report in on Journey to X You might think spending all day for a week with the same people doing the same thing every day might get tedious and boring and also make you get at each other’s throats. Luckily this isn't true with the cast of Journey to X. The February half term is usually that week off where members of Yew Tree get time to relax, but for those who choose to do Connections it’s a week of intense rehearsals, finding new things about the play and characters and getting it truly ready for performance.   It has been a tiring process, filled with countless runs of scenes, to fill them with personality and truth within the script, not to mention bringing the energy needed to power through the performance whilst still keeping it entertaining especially in scenes where not a lot may be happening on stage. Discovery is the key word of this week. It can be major things about character, to looking at the different ways a line can be ...

James Budenburg generously blogged about Yew Tree Arts performance of Encounters... I’ll start by saying just how good Encounters is, it’s brilliant and if you haven’t seen it you’re missing out.   It’s completely different to anything else I’ve seen. The start is really nice, probably because of its naturalism; the setting allows you to relate to the characters a bit more than you can do in a theatre, well in my opinion anyway. The main ideas are introduced in the first setting, which draws your attention into all the others. Just realised I hadn’t mentioned that it’s in the Hepworth. But yeah, it moves right around the Hepworth. Which brings me to my favourite moment in the entire piece, this is really harsh because the whole play is so deep, but there is one line in which the art-loving Jed describes the reason he likes one of the sculptures merely because of its colour. I think the line is so good because of the characterisation though, as there is a scene nearer the beginni...

Distractions are all over the place…even as I write this my eye is being constantly drawn to the sights of other people in the café I’m sat in, the sound of other people’s conversations.   In some ways distractions are good…they keep us entertained, they provide unexpected inspiration…they can make us feel like we belong, that we have allies…that we’re connected to more of our world…which is good as there is no escape from them…facebook, tumblr, twitter etc etc etc mean that we can be equally as distracted in an empty room as I’m being now. However these distractions demand a price and that price becomes infinitely greater the minute there is something that needs doing…and greater again when there is a time constraint on that something being done, like thinking about a character for example or sorting out and finding costume or dare I say it…learning lines… Far be it from me to dictate what people do in their spare time…once you walk out of the rehearsal room I am...

Rhiann is our guest blogger this week So Crimson’s session this week started the best way. Laughing our socks off over absolutely nothing, okay it was over something, a joke which wasn’t even funny yet we all couldn’t stop which was possibly the most hilarious thing ever, One of the best points about Crimson is we can act like idiots and no-one cares! Worst thing is that’s nobody cracks at ‘if you really loved me, you’d smile’ (except the crazy few of us) since I was the one left in the middle after asking three people – never felt more unloved. Then we had to come up with three reasons why we liked and three reasons we didn’t like Shakespeare. Now in my opinion, there are no reasons but apparently he’s boring, nobody understands his language and he’s a party crasher since he died on his birthday! The best part of the session was definitely reading Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ famous speech which happens to be my favourite. We discovered so much about why Shakespeare used the words...

The next in our series of higher education blogs by Matthew Plummer... Drama: From the view of a first year at Liverpool college... It isn’t easy. But, at the same time, it is not hard if it’s what you love. I won’t go into auditions except to say: Auditions (for me) are hell until you’re there, then you lose yourself like a workshop and it’s great, you see moments of genius and people fall on their faces. I fell on my face. But I wouldn’t change it for the world, sometimes mistakes are better than conscious designs. You’ll spend your contact hours with your tutors (12 hours for me) but you won’t want to leave the inspiring environment, surrounded by inspiring people from different backgrounds all with inspiring ideas and stories to tell.   I took a huge leap going to university, I went against my dream of being an actor leaning towards more of a creator (god complex). I moved away from home, to a strange city (Liverpool doesn’t get much stranger) and dove into every workshop wi...

One of the joys and difficulties of my job is the uncertainty of knowing how a group are going to respond to a task or idea…you can never predict what a company will pick up and run with or what will get a luke warm response…this was illustrates very clearly on Monday… I’d decided to do Absurdist theatre, something that in my college lecturer phase I had specialized in to some extent…I’ll be honest, I was in two minds right up until I gave out the excerpts of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” as to whether my plan was a good idea or not…Sapphire are made up of many talented individuals but some of them are only 11 and very much at the start of their Yew Tree climb to greatness…I had a horrible feeling it might turn out to be too challenging for them… Turns out it was a brilliant idea…the group responded so creatively and with such integrity their shared work at the end was a pleasure to behold…some of them struggled in the making but were happy to follow advice ...

Michael takes our third and final guest slot this week... So, Sapphire... Monday was pretty great I think, started off with best and worst (for a change) and had a cheeky round of the bean game     In which a new bean was discovered: "Pirates of the carriBEAN". Utter genius in my opinion. We then proceeded to the meat of the session: the creative task. We were all split into twos and given a piece of duologue and were told to make something from it. Not necessarily stage it, but make something.   So we were pretty much free to do whatever we wanted, so long as it was inspired by the script. And the results we got we very impressive, my personal favourite being Tom and Ross's piece. Specifically Tom's speech about how to win at a game of chess, it confused the hell out of me, how on earth can someone memorise such long numbers?! But Ross's comedic timing with his "Checkmate" was brilliant. Shame we didn't get to see all of them really...   But yes I...

Olena is our next guest blogger... Heads...Heads…Heads… On Monday, the wonderfully awesome Sapphire Company were studying absurd theatre. It sounds absurd... it is absurd... and it was absurd. Warming up with the chaos game, one of my favourites although it isn't as good as park bench, prepared us perfectly for what was to come. With instructions like every 5 seconds walk up to somebody and give them a hug and constantly skip around the circle shouting ''I'm Mary Poppins'' (one of the best things I’ve done, it was surprisingly fun) set us in the right mind to produce some lovely pieces of drama. Reading through the scripts that were handed out to us, we all quickly engaged with our partners and from what I saw our minds swiftly set to work. From the pieces that were shown I particularly enjoyed Michael and Brittany's interpretation was brilliant. Michael's character was very well portrayed and his, what I call ''pleh'', attitude to ev...

India with the third of our series of blogs offering insights into Drama in Higher Education I am currently in my second year studying Acting BA (Hons) at the University of Central Lancashire and I love it!   Like most people wanting to become an Actor I originally looked at drama schools and when my Dad suggested I apply at some Universities I turned my nose up. However, I went for the audition and fell in love with the ‘Media Factory’ which is where most of my lessons/lectures take place. I was still a bit hesitant after I received a place on the course but after my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to stay at home if I didn’t go to uni I didn’t realise have a choice! I thank them for pushing me now though. My course is made up of 80% performance and 20% theory sooo, essays and stuff. My first year was spent trying to reach the goal that was called ‘re-patterning’ the body, I did this through 6 hours of voice, 6 hours of yoga and movement, 3 hours of biomechanics, 3 hours of cla...