What's happening at YTYT

It feels like only a moment since I was in Zurich and only minutes since we finished Once Upon a Fairytale but the focus has well and truly shifted this week as Black Company hunkered down into the final rehearsal phase of Maybe This Time.   It’s rare I direct a musical nowadays but this play is the near to one as you’ll get from me.   It’s a play with a history – I wrote it over a decade ago and it’s had a number of incarnations over the years but for the 2016 performance I did something of a rewrite – the play has definitely benefitted from it’s face lift and we’ve also bravely gone to town with the number of songs and dances in it too.   What really impressed me on Thursday was the wealth of stunning voices that are featured in the production.   Really talented singers are deliciously complimented by brilliant dancers, choreography and great music choices.    The play is fun, entertaining with engaging characters and a healthy dash of romance and r...

Tom is our guest blogger this week... So Thursday was an action packed Yew Tree day. At 10 o’clock, in the cold back room of West Yorkshire Theatre Dance Centre, armed with coats and flasks, 4 young people (myself included) began a voyage of discovery into the work of the renowned Stanislavski. And what a voyage it was. From Given Circumstances to Magic If, from Emotional Memory to in depth character development, we absorbed all the information we could possibly take in over the 6 hours available to us. Now, Stanislavski has his flaws. His method isn’t perfect, and cannot be applied to every single acting scenario. However, with the monologues each of us had chosen, the study of his work allowed us to gain an insight into various directions we could take, and gifted us with tools and techniques to make it possible. Every person had chosen a character very different to their own personality, and it was through the knowledge we now possessed that we accessed these characters and...

This week has been jam packed with all sorts of loveliness so I will make up for last week's blog brevity with something a little more insightful. Last weekend saw the culmination of my latest partnership efforts with West Yorkshire Theatre Dance Centre as we celebrated our final performance of Once Upon a Fairytale.   There was so much to be proud of – not least the enormous amount of collaboration between the dance school – it’s teachers and choreographers and costume makers   – the students, their parents (many of whom chaperoned in addition to transporting and sorting costumes) and supporters – the crew at the theatre – and of course the YTYT input as writer, director and technical co-ordination…with the brilliant Amy Winder on follow spot In total over 350 young people aged between 3 and 18 performed in the show over the three performances.   It was a testament to what can be achieved when people have a common goal. The payoff was we made something truly bea...

Jessica from Sapphire is our guest blogger This week at Sapphire we went down the cobbles and made our own soap operas! It was every bit as dramatic as I thought. We each had a family and a back story we had to devise three scenes: one for the morning at breakfast time, then Sarah gave two people a new emotion and we had to carry on the scene and last we carried on later in the day where we had to pick another card and we had to play it out. My group got 'a stolen phone' it was so much fun !!! I actually never thought that I would never have so much fun doing this workshop but it was fun because you could be as over dramatic as you want!

·       Get the culture right ·       Build an atmosphere of trust ·       Yes and all the way with the bravery to discard what isn’t useful; ·       Story and character is everything ·       Give them the vocal skills and physicality to become the character and tell the story ·       Make sure your actors know what your characters want at all times ·       Make sure they know who they are addressing each line to ·       Empower your actors to be the best they can be within the ensemble of the company ·       Focus on the distance travelled as well as the destination ·       Play to encourage discovery, flexibility and openness ·       Don’t be afraid to say I don’t know or to change things ...

Emily is our guest blogger So my week starts with the Yew Tree-ness (officially now a word) of Sapphire in which we did a more structured version of Wink Murder. We set it in a 1920's bar filled with people from bar-tenders to managers, gangsters to showgirls. We had 4 scenes, scene one had all of our entrances in the groups of types of people that were there, including a routine of showgirls. Scene two had a change in dynamics as genres of character were mixed so we saw deeper character traits and it concluded with the announcement that a murder will happen in the bar that night. Dun dun dunnnn!!!! (you can tell I'm no specialist in sound effects) Scene three had the actual murder. It was sadly Eve, a fellow showgirl. This swiftly moved into scene four where we made our assumptions of who we believed the murderer was. Guys I have a confession... I am the murderer! Then we got to Friday, tech rehearsal day! If you've missed it all on Facebook and Instagram, YTYT members ...

Last year whilst working on Alice in Wonderland I came up with an idea for what I thought would make the perfect dance show story for our partners in creativity WYTDC…I had this really strong image of Aurora waking up, still surrounded by a forest of thorns with a conspicuous absence of true loves kiss.   I had a vision of a fairytale land with two conflicting forces of light and dark magic with a Queen of each domain at war…and I had great fun piecing together an adventure for a tribe of questing fairytale characters headed by a determined Peter Pan as they unite and rise above anything they have achieved before to save the land and their Queen of Light from the clutches of Dark Magic…   By July of last year the principle characters were cast and over the summer the script written, ready for the start of rehearsals in September… Yesterday I was in the Wakefield Theatre Royal for one of the final rehearsals of the play that had sprung all that time ago from nowhere i...

Laura is our guest blogger this week! When Sarah first suggested a ‘Yew Tree for Adults’, I was immediately interested. I’d been in school productions, and had always enjoyed it, but hadn’t been on a stage for years.   I thought it might help with public speaking, like giving presentations at work, and that it could be fun.   When Silver Company started, Sarah started us off gently. We worked on improvisation, scripts, characters, physical theatre, breathing, and much more that I have hopefully absorbed but can’t recall.   Although I enjoyed doing something different each week, I think we all felt it would be good to work on something over a few weeks.   We dipped our toe in the water before Christmas, working on Act One of Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie.   Since we didn’t seem to do too badly with it(!), in the new year we started to rehearse a fantastically written (thanks Sarah!) short play.   I’m really enjoying being challenged to work on my chara...