What's happening at YTYT

What a whirlwind of a week – finished Remember the Oaks on Sunday on Monday dived into The Hepworth Job.   Which meant I and my lovely cast spent a whole week immersing ourselves in a ridiculous romp where a group of teenagers attempt (unsuccessfully) to steal a priceless piece of art from The Hepworth Gallery.   I enjoyed every minute of it for a myriad of reasons… To start with, what a cast!   Each one a joy…each one entirely committed! Each one of them wonderfully talented and prepared to be bold and brave.   More importantly each one fully engaged in the business of working together and fully aware that magic is made in the relationships within a company and between characters… Another reason is site specific work is my favourite form of making work…to be able to make something that fits in the place where it is performed is such creative happiness.   It gives it an immediacy and an energy that is entirely unique. As a flippant thing but none th...

Hi I’m Helena, I’ve never written a blog post before so this may be choppy but I’ll give it a good go. The Hepworth Job was a weeklong project where basically we were given a script written by Sarah and we had to get together and make a show in a week. Within this week, I met loads of new people, created many friendships and remembered the reason I fell in love with this community at eleven years old... Soppy I know but incredibly true. The one thing that I noticed throughout the past week is the just how powerful theatre is. When you’re in a show and you spend a couple of months having to cast, block, run and perfect it, I think the gravity of what you’re actually creating is sometimes forgotten. Being forced to do this all in a week and trying to still come out with a performance just as high a standard as one in rehearsal for months, really made me realise that theatre is powerful stuff not only for the audience, but for us as an ensemble. When you’re on a mega time limit, you re...

You only need to read these blogs reasonably frequently to know that Yew Tree Youth Theatre are almost consequently building up to, in the middle of or recovering from a performance of some description.   This means that I am doing the same… All of these performances are special in some way – they’re all about young people being excellent…but some of them are really very special… Remember the Oaks qualifies as just that…commissioned by the NUM it is a play that tracks the 150 years since 361 miners lost their lives in England’s worst mining disaster.   It’s a play about the community that had to carry on in the midst of all that grief.   It’s a play about how important it is to remember the legacy of a communities past and it’s a play about belonging and hope and integrity.   There’s a little romance, a fair amount of loss and there’s a lot of bravery…it’s a play about the best and worst of persevering through life’s challenges. We performed it yesterday to ...

Emily is our second... So yesterday was Black Company's performance for Remember the Oaks; a play in which we portrayed how the memory of what happened in the Barnsley Mining Disaster 150 years ago has changed through the years and becoming more and more distant, hence why the permanent memorial is being raised for so that the memory lives on. 9:15am on a Sunday morning in Barnsley Lamproom Theatre may not seem the perfect day or time for an intense tech rehearsal however we all came armed, prepared and still slightly tired. To begin the tech run we familiarised ourselves with the stage itself and backstage as there were many hazards such as beams, steps and loose wires to trip over, most of which I managed to bump into at some point during the day... The sculpture was placed at the back of the stage and she is beautiful to say the least. We ran the major physical sequences such as the opening, the miner's strike and our foxtrotting scene (we are now all experts). Then it wa...

Becky is our first guest blogger! Yesterday, with the company of a group of people from Yew Tree's Gold company, I had the pleasure of a lovely visit to the Yorkshire sculpture park. Although I am very familiar with the place, it is always a refreshing experience to look at a site with a different group of people. We began the day with a few games: the classic list game, a good ol' game of "ninja" and killer 12; however, unlike the average session of Gold, we were surrounded by the beautiful backdrop of the Sculpture park. Next, it was onto some sight-specific theatre in the "Longside gallery". At first, we took a few minutes to explore the current exhibition, "A night in the museum", which is made up of a range of sculptures that resemble people, placed so they look to gaze at artworks featuring the colour blue, before being split off into small groups. After coming up with either a short narrative about two pieces of artwork or a con...

I love the fact that however long you do something for there is always something you can learn about it or simply realize you’ve lost sight of something valuable… As you have probably guessed this week included an example of just such a thing.   We’re in full swing now with rehearsals for Remember the Oaks – the performance is just around the corner.   Until our latest rehearsal I was getting frustrated because despite the hard work of everyone concerned the production was undeniably lacking something.   We’d not made very much progress over the last couple of weeks and I was beginning to worry about whether we were going to get it where we hoped by the deadline of the performance. Remember the Oaks is a complicated show – it spans 150 years – it is inspired by real life events and it will be seen by an audience that includes people whose families were affected by The Oaks mining disaster (a tragedy that still qualifies as England’s worst mining catastrophe) ...

The Yew-logy of Bailey D Poching (warning, this blog is littered with in jokes, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, don’t panic, you won’t be alone) Picture the scene. It’s a cold February night, 2015, and we’ve just finished our performance of hacktivists. As a result of post-performance conversations, plans were hatched to bring John Broadhead, Sam mandhi-Ghomi and yes, you guessed it, Bailey Poching to Gold Company the following Saturday. It was questionable as to whether we’d actually see them, but sure enough, come 10 o’clock they were piling in the doors of Wakefield college, and from there their Yew Tree lives began. The summer term was spent devising the Christmas shows, and we saw early that Bailey had a natural ability to bring humour to pretty much any room he walked into. No one was immune to his wit and it was always exciting to watch his work. We moved into the autumn term involving incidents with a very special white t-shirt and swapping jeans at...