What's happening at YTYT

I want to congratulate all my actors in YTYT for getting this far.   You’ve pretty much learnt your lines, you’ve almost sorted your costumes, you’ve taken and responded to all the notes I’ve bombarded you with.   You’ve also taken the time to come to rehearsals even when you’ve been ill or school/college has been ridiculously demanding or when all the other stuff going on in your life has felt like it’s all too much.   I am fully aware that the expectations on you grow and grow and yet week after week you show up and give me the best you can.   I never take it for granted. The result of your effort is that our Christmas shows are just about there and so in order that you enjoy them to the fullest extent I wanted to remind you of something.   Your rehearsal room and your stage is a place to let all of your worldly responsibilities go…you can put them down for a while and let your world become smaller.   Then at the end when you pick them up again y...

Tom Mason is our guest blogger! This is my first Yew Tree blog and I really don't know what to write…so here goes nothing. Eclipse is turning out to be a lot of firsts for me: my first time being double cast, my first time performing (and trying to be sociable) with this many people I've spent minimal or no time with in the past, my first time playing weird and wonderful games that Gemma won't allow into Crimson for some reason... But I guess that all just comes with this being my first connections. In fact, as far as I can remember I may be the first person from Crimson to do a Connections (or a Yew Tree blog...eek). The first thing to strike me about Connections is how hands-on the process is; regular 5-7 rehearsals on a Saturday night in which we work tremendously hard for most of, if not all. I couldn't have prepared myself for how strange it is to be double cast either, creating your own character and then watching someone take it in a completely dif...

It’s been another busy, busy week at YTYT – some of us had the pleasure of going to see the simply excellent Splendid Productions perform at The Lowry on Tuesday.   Their production of The Odyssey was raucous, chaotic and entirely engaging   - a completely original take on a very old tale of epic adventure, war and ego.   Yet again Kerry Frampton’s ability to stop that chaos with the most beautiful, poignant character narrative is stunning.   The whole thing was a master class in the possibility of performance. One of things that takes up quite a bit of time at the moment is directing two pretty large scale performances for the New Year so Friday and Saturday involved full on rehearsals for them…Peter Pan is in January and tickets are on sale here – it includes a number of lovely YTYT members and promises to be a fantastical treat.   The other production “Once Upon a Fairy Tale, “ in partnership with WYTDC, is epic with a cast of 100’s.   I thoroughl...

Tom's blog for this week There’s a look I get, when I describe my typical week at yew tree. It’s a cross between sheer amazement and slight worry for my sanity, as I list every day of the week being filled with a variety of activities. But the amount I do gives me experiences very few people have access to, and so this blog is going to be my attempt to allow you a rudimentary insight into what I do. Because frankly, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Now, we start at Sapphire Company, who this year are performing “The Princess and the Frog” as their Christmas show. It’s a play that follows the traditional Sapphire style of subtle wit and fast paced dialogue, but it comes with its own brand new set of challenges. One in particular, being the 3ft frog puppet that must be operated by 3 man team. Lip syncing, stance control and movement are all skills the teams have had to master, and I have to compliment Gabe in particular for the hard work he’s evidently   put in to make the ...

Black Company's Hannah Mullen... First blog post, go easy on me Yew Tree readers. After a few years of watching and supporting Yew Tree and their many brilliant productions, I recently I have had my nights free to finally give it a go. Not regretting it one bit…yet. I was apprehensive about my first session at Black Company but was welcomed by the enthusiastic and lovely Sarah (she paid me to write that) and the friendly Yew Tree members.   After being introduced to ‘Best and Worst’, a task that involves us racking our brains to remember what exciting or unexciting things we have got up to in the week, the time had then come to act, and a daunting prospect it was. I have often been asked and told by other people that all we thespians do is embody trees in drama, and every time I make sure I reply, with a deadpanned face, “no” as if that was the most foolish thing to have ever come out of their mouths. So, in the first session of Black Company, what was...

It’s that time of the year again when the Christmas performances are just around the corner and the productions aren’t quite where they need to be…this last stage is hard as there are no easy fixes…we’re into finding the technical precision that turns something from mediocre to magical…so for the benefit of my brilliant actors and so that their parents and supporters understand the challenge ahead of them I’ve prepared a how to guide to make your performance and our production reach it’s potential… Firstly comes line security – the more you know and understand the entire script including but not exclusively your lines and your cues the more you have a solid foundation from which to do everything else you need to do! Secondly vocal quality makes a big difference…we are finding time to do some vocal work in some of the company sessions but for the older actors any work they can do between sessions on projection, expression, articulation, intonation is going to make such a positi...

Toni is our excellent guest blogger this week... Connections is back! You probably weren't very aware that it was away because of how quick it seems to have been since we performed Hacktivists at Kendal but we're more than ready to say 'welcome back' to the 5-7 Saturday night slot. And so, with a few extra recruits for this year, tonight's rehearsal was the first read through with the set casts and a time for us to discuss our thoughts on the play Eclipse and the partner piece we are creating along side it: The Darkness in the Light. The thing that struck me the most while listening to the read through was how utterly different Eclipse is from Hacktivists. Pretty much the entirety of the play is written in verse with rhymes- a complete contrast to the naturalist dialogue of last year. Hearing the lines read out, though, suddenly gave parts of the play a definite eerie sense and others a more playful feel that works very well- especially with the links of paga...

Although I am used to Black Company being delightful but this week at Black Company was full of extra, additional, unanticipated creative delights. As our current production for Festive Tales (Tickets On Sale NOW !!) is a physical theatre piece, in amongst the Best and Worsts and games this term our warm up has included physical theatre exercises.   These creative tasks have been pursued to create a confidence in physical theatre that will enhance our performance but our intention is not usually to create anything that will transfer out of the rehearsal room. This week however something magical happened and I’ve spent some time thinking about what the ingredients were that made this particular creative task so impressive.   Was it the task? The actors? The partnerships? The music? What turned the exercise into something so strong it had to be shared and so has formed the foundations of the start of our production? After some thought I’ve come to th...

Leah is our second blogger... BOOM! First blog for this year’s Connections! Mind you, this is my second guest blog so please don’t expect anything spectacular.   So yesterday we had the auditions for our Connections play this year called Eclipse and as always they were a fantastic start to what is going to be, possibly, the best Connections I have taken part in yet. As always, everyone did magnificently! I honestly do not know how Sarah does what she does! Everyone really tried hard and pushed themselves and the decision that she was left with was one of the hardest things I could ever dream of doing. I saw sides to people I have never seen before which both shocked and delighted me (along with the overwhelming, crushing nerves that racked my body).     Tom Osborne started us off with a powerful portrayal of Klondike in the first scene...

First time blogger Jessica is our first guest writer... Yew Tree Youth Theatre is a great, it is an amazing club that I look forward to going to each week. I go to Sapphire Company on a Monday. It is run by Sarah who is cool and more energetic than most of us!! At the moment we are practising our Christmas production of the princess and the frog but it is not like the way you have heard it in your child hood as we have fashionista's, wildlife presenters and a politics expert .  At the moment it is not perfect but it is almost there as we have a fantastic cast who are putting in 110% effort into the production. I love the way that we are doing it because we all work as a team and Sarah lets us have our say in how things are done . Even though we are only part way through rehearsals it is looking incredible and hopefully it will only get better!

It’s a bit tricky to know where to begin this week after the intensity of the Halloween week…I’ll go with Hurray!! I think as that best sums up my reaction to a day of performances yesterday where everything went pretty well as well as we hoped it would… The commissions was to create a range of pop up theatre of a ghostly, eerie nature suitable to be performed in the galleries of the Hepworth…we had a couple of weeks to pull it together and 17 actors to utilize to their best extent…quite a tall order and one which I approached with a suitable amount of respect… Now Halloween performances are not unfamiliar to us – we have been at Nostell Priory for the last 3 years creating theatre for the same occasion but every venue requires a different approach and so I made that our creative planning carefully considered the surroundings we would be performing in. As a consequence one of the most interesting things about the performance was the relationship between location and perfor...

Alice is our guest blogger Once again, my camouflage skills have failed me and it seems that my small size is only useful when other people want to make a joke about it and not when I need to use it to hide from Sarah's smooth and innocent questions such as... "who fancies writing a blog about Halloween?" *hides in a corner and pretends to be doing something important* ".......Alice! Well volunteered!" So here I am, the day after, looking out into the misty night and wondering... why wasn’t it like this yesterday!? That would've been awesome! However, after everything, we didn’t need the creepy atmosphere! Brilliant actors, costumes and scripts made it easy to send a shiver down every person's spine. I may be the only one to say this, but I was surprised about how relaxing it was and how smoothly the night went. The whole thing was brilliantly organised and I am so pleased I was able to be part of it. After only a week of rehearsing, I was...