What's happening at YTYT

Friday the 26th of August and it’s raining…not only is it raining but the sky looks pretty set to carry on doing so for the rest of the day…we’d arranged to have a picnic to celebrate the drawing to a close of the Summer holidays and the success of our Nostell Performance “Duel.” Last year’s version had been a lovely event, glorious sunshine, a long relaxing afternoon and many a game of that’s out…This time however we are not so lucky and it had been touch and go throughout the morning as to whether I cancelled it. There are 20 or so YTYT members expected and I start to wonder if many of them will show as a result of the horrid weather however as is usually the case I needn’t have worried… By 1.30 despite the rain 20 youth theatre members had duly assembled and although admittedly there were varying degrees of enthusiasm emanating from the individuals present they had all been committed enough to turn up. Not only did they turn up but after we’d had a look around the house most o...

Our second guest blogger this week is Jack Iredale... So, we had a directing workshop on Thursday. It was enjoyable, but I came away with one major thought, that I’m probably going to wait a bit before I try it out. Granted, I was a bit better at it than I thought, which may have been because I was directing people I knew, I imagine if it were a new company, I would find it much harder, at least at my current level. Then again, that was covered but what we thought about in the beginning, what a director is and what they shouldn’t be, which essentially boils down to keep in control, have a good relationship with your company and know what you want to do, whether that’s everything in a piece, or just one simple idea, if you know what you want to do with it. This came in handy when we had to direct each other. The first round of directors had it the hardest, as they had to direct Pinter, not the easiest to do in a 20-30 minute time limit, but I think this worked as an effective ice ...

Tom Osborne blogs about his experience of the Summer at Yew Tree Well then my second blog and its all about the great time I’ve had at Yew Tree this summer. It started with a brilliant play in a day for youth theatre members aged 11 to 14 with Gemma. The play was King Arthur which is right up my street as I love swords and battles. To my delight I even got to have a fight with real swords against Chris.( I’m still not sure why they trusted me) You can see the photos of this day on the ytyt facebook page. However I’m lucky enough to have done a second play in a day again with Gemma this time doing, “Where the Wild Things Are,” with 7 – 11 year olds. Again I really enjoyed it because it’s nice to not always do long more complicated plays and do something a bit less tricky. I loved listening to the wonders of seven year old’s imagination. Another thing I noticed is how different people from Yew Tree look from less experienced actors. People like Chris Marsay already knew exactly w...

Jonathan Hopwood with his blog about the Physical Theatre day... It’s like maths. Physical Theatre is something that you can relax into, have both an internal journey and an external journey with and will, more often than not, come across interesting if not entertaining to an audience. There is always something very cathartic about physical theatre, it acts as some form of release and I think this is due to expressing what’s happening in your head physically and then having the opportunity to speak about it afterwards. The second part of the equation is Yew Tree. Yew Tree provides such an open, easy environment to create and experiment with physical theatre. Physical theatre is often quite challenging as it requires a lot of trust and contact and awareness; it sometimes needs people to come out of their comfort zones to meet the requirements of a task or exercise. However, at no point with Yew Tree, does anyone feel awkward or out of place. Everyone is so accepting and conscious ...

Some weeks it’s really obvious to me what I want the blog to be about and some weeks I have to just start writing and see what emerges…this is one of the second sort of weeks… I think the lack of a clear subject this week is because there have been too many nice things to choose from…the Pinter Workshop on Monday was an intellectual delight…11 actors trying to get their heads round the ambiguity of his scripts looking at what’s inferred, at communicating the subtext and at the challenge of portraying characters when so little is known about them from the text alone… Then I had the privilege of calling in for the last 90 minutes of the Play in a Day…12 youth theatre members aged 11- 14 years had spent the day exploring the legends of King Arthur and had in doing so created an utterly engaging piece of theatre. Under the famed creative eye of our one and only Gemma Whelan they had produced something with integrity and humour that was a joy to watch… Finally for the Summer Days ...

Charlotte blogged about the Pinter day... I chose to do the Pinter workshop because the way his work is regarded really intrigued me. Beforehand, the research gave me certain preconceptions which people had such as pauses and ambiguity. In fact, it's the ambiguity, yet specifics of stage direction that does it for me. The way nothing can be taken for granted. It has to have been the most inspiring workshop/session yet since as soon as I got home, I was reading reviews and information on Moonlight and other such works. Job well done !

A blog from Mel about the Shakespeare day... Doing the shakepeare day at clarke hall was a unique suprise and changed the day around to what we originally expected. we started off the day with a introduction, best and worst and a game of ninja warrior. we then got split into groups and were given the prologue to Henry the Fith to create an idea and compose an "epic" scene, then we got into new groups and moved on to Hamlet, for this we had to incorporate and focus on the tragedy within the scene. Last of all we got paired of and worked on a dualogue from Measure for Measure. We watched everyones performances and then all got together to end the day with what we had learned and the part we most enjoyed. i loved learning about new plays that i knew nothing about and working in different groups to normal GERTRUUDEEEEEEEEEE