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 ...