What's happening at YTYT

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...

My blog this morning is ever so simple in it’s intent – I just want to say congratulations – an 8 week half term…an absolute marathon…and you made it – more or less (I hope) intact…please spend your Sunday being ever so proud of yourself! Whether you’re a child or young person in the ever increasingly pressurized environment of education – battling trials and assessments made even more challenging if you’re contemplating what the next chapter of further or higher education might be.   Whether you’re a parent supporting your child through the hoops they’re trying to jump to come out with whatever they need to progress…living and dying inside with their successes and disappointments…whilst at the same time ensuring they are nourished in mind body and spirit and still having something of a childhood.   Whether you are a teacher/tutor/trainer trying to please the powers that be that insist on telling you how it should be done leaving very little room for intuition and humanit...

The words of the very excellent John Broadhead! A month or two ago, the opportunity arose to join Black Company, and deciding that Saturday mornings were better suited for sleep than Thursday evenings, I took it. The idea was at first daunting, joining a company of actors more seasoned than a well prepared steak (where as I am comparatively bland in that regard), but I wasn't alone in taking that step, which was a comfort. Soon after, we set to work on a heavily physical interpretation on Red Riding Hood, a name which conjures images of tiny actors in red cloaks, a great fellow in fur playing the wolf, and legions of primary school children gleefully playing trees . It wasn't these images that bothered me - I trusted Sarah to devise something decidedly more mature. It was that word: 'physical'. That word instantly brought about some apprehension - mincing about a stage 'representing' things certainly wasn't my cup of tea, but I'd just started, so with ...

On Thursday I went to see the NT Live showing of Hamlet – a stage performance live streamed from the Barbican in London into Wakefield Cineworld –that something like that is now possible is an impressive thing…but impressiveness was to be had in bucket loads that evening.   Firstly there was the vision of the production – just brilliantly epic – even better when you find out the director is Lyndsey Turner who featured in my Excellent People blog earlier this month.   More impressiveness was on display in the performances of the actors including of course Benedict (I’ve decided we can be on first name terms) There was a directness and honesty about their approach to the text that transformed one of the most quoted plays in history into a fascinating journey of a man who’s life is transformed by the death of his father…which was exactly as it should be and I was entranced from start to finish… The final bit of impressiveness came from the interview s...

The very excellent Hannah Speke is the first blogger... It's been a pretty busy week Yew Tree wise this week. I've had Yearbook rehearsals and then performances in Barnsley and Featherstone as part of the first week of Yearbook's six week tour across Barnsley and Wakefield high schools performing to year 7 pupils. As well as doing Yearbook I spent my Thursday afternoon with the lovely Orange company. Their numbers have significantly increased since the new term started and so even getting through best and worst is a mammoth task. Once we'd got through that and played a few games to make sure everyone was warmed up, we cracked on with putting together Orange's version of 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' which is going to be performed at the Yew Tree Christmas shows. This week Sarah was in charge of the elves, Tom had the reindeer and I got to work with the lovely weather fairies. We had a read through and then chatted about characters and how each of...