Well that's us all wrapped up and finished for the year at BYT. Our Seniors went out with a bang with their show 'Make Your Mark'. This was a look at a number of different ideas based on what the possibilities of our after-life could be. The show ended with a great moment where we asked the audience to make their mark anywhere on the Wallace Bennett theatre. This was the last ever performance in the space and it was amazing to see all the lovely, thought-provoking, messages that people left.
An audience member makes her mark
Some more marks
One of or tutors has written about his experiences of youth theatre in the Arts Guild through the years, you can read about them here.
Our younger ones also had a wee showing of their work so far. We learned about the adventures of Mr Skinny by the rimary 1/2s, the Land of Lost Things from our P3/5s and the Dog Ship Enterprise from the P6/7s. These ideas will all be used in creating our large-scale theatre extravaganza that will be on the Beacon main stage in May and will feature the whole youth theatre. Thanks to the parents and grandparents who came along to our temporary accommodation (and thanks to the Scouts for the loan of their hut!) and gave the children a chance to show you their ideas.
P1/2s enjoy some cake in-between rehearsing 'Mr Skinny'!
A couple of weeks ago our younger classes said goodbye to the Arts Guild in the most fitting way, by eating lots of cakes! We had a great wee Christmas party and said farewell. We can't wait to move into our new home at the Beacon, it's going to be a fantastic facility that we will definitely make the most of!
Drama is always better when it involves cake and biscuits!
All the staff at the BYT would like to wish our members and their families a great Christmas and we look forward to welcoming everyone back to our new home in the new year!
We have been busy as ever at BYT this term, with every class working on their own project - we are off on holiday for a week so now is an ideal time to reflect on what we've been up to.
Our P1-2 class have been writing a short musical about Mr Skinny and his amazing, disappearing hat, whilst our P3-5 class have been devising a play based on the idea of 'The Land of Lost Things'.
P3-5 work on The Land of Lost Things
Marianne has been working closely with the young people to create an entirely original script based on the ideas of the class. Today we started to get the show on it's feet and, as you can see from these pictures, it's already looking very exciting!
Our P6-7 class have been doing the same exercises and have ended up with a play called 'The Dog-Ship Enterprise'. We have spent the last couple of weeks looking at movement and how we can incorporate some exciting balancing exercises into the show.
Lauren and Katie show us a fantastic balancing exercise
The next few weeks will also be about getting the show up on its feet and we hope to be able to show it to parents sometime soon.
It can sometimes be quite scary when you're the one who's unbalanced!
Our seniors have been working on a show called 'Make Your Mark'. This is a really exciting project that will take place on the 6th and 7th of December. It's based on a book called Sum: Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman (you can read more about it here) and we hope it will be a fitting show to say goodbye to the Arts Guild once and for all. The show will be in the Wallace Bennett theatre, which is appropriate as that has been the home of BYT (and formerly GYT) since we started.
So that's where we are just now, we hope that we can take some of the ideas from our classes to create a large-scale show for all our young people to take part in early next year. This will be the first BYT show on the new Beacon stage, it's going to be really exciting!
Phew! Today was a great day that saw us adding the final touches to our brand new show 'Petunia Picklebottom Vs the Zombie Army' before we performed it to an audience filled with friends and family.
Thursday saw us working on the props and art for the show. The process for this was the same as everything else from the week, the young people came up with the ideas and our expert tutors, in this case our visiting art tutor Lucy and our regular tutors Marianne and Megan, helped guide them along.
Hollie with her amazing glasses!
Julline with her psychedelic moustache
Today was all about rehearsing the show and getting the best out of the young people. It is amazing how hard working they all are, and it was great to see such a wide age group pull together and work as a team to create something that was really great fun and entirely their own. The show was a resounding success and everyone involved should be extremely proud of themselves!
We had so much going on yesterday that I forgot to take any pictures for the blog! But I remembered today....
It has been all go at the Arts Guild as we start bringing our script 'Petunia Picklebottom Vs The Zombie Army' to life. It's a fast-paced, ridiculously silly story about death, destruction, zombies and... emmmm.... bubbles.
The opening of the play (with copious notes!)
Yesterday we spent the first part of the day coming up with some songs for various key moments in the play. These included 'My Name is Roy (and I'm not a Boy)' and the 'Freaky Voodoo Woman' song. All the ideas for the story and the songs have come from the young people.
The rest of the day was spent getting the play on it's feet. It's not the longest piece in the world but there's a LOT going on, and time is tight, so we worked really hard in the afternoon and today in getting it all pieced together.
The INCREDIBLE Picklebottom
The story follows two characters, Roy McClumperton and Petunia Picklebottom. Both have very different tales to tell, but circumstance means that there lives cross at a great turning point for both of them... it just so happens that as all that other stuff is going on, a zombie apocalypse is beginning to take place.
Working on the graveyard scene
The group have worked really well together, we go from Primary 1's right up to 6th years and it has been a joy to see all ages pulling together to create what will hopefully be a fun-filled show. Tomorrow we will be working on creating props with an art teacher who's dropping in (see Marianne's initial list below!), rehearsing a bit more of the play and getting ready for our performance on Friday afternoon at 3.00.
Today was the start of our 'Create Your Own Show' Summer School. It was a loads of fun with a wide variety of young people of all ages taking part. The idea is that we all meet on the Monday morning with nothing, and by the time we have got to Friday we will have created a brand new play from scratch. Nobody - not even the tutors - know where the week will take us, and that's what makes it so fun!
We started with... sugar cubes! We watched how they melted and fell apart in a glass of water, then in groups we tried to show how it dissolved using our bodies. This may sound crazy but it allowed us to create really interesting movement sections and, after watching each groups work, we started to get some ideas about where our story could take us.
Watching the sugar dissolve!
After a few more similar exercises we were getting some very interesting shapes and various themes were coming up again and again. Zombies seemed to spring to mind every now and again as did evolution... we didn't know where this was going, but it was something! We then looked at a quote from the Tempest by William Shakespeare, here it is:
Each group selected their favourite line and then created a movement out of that, this then led to more interesting suggestions. Things like super-heroes and coming up from the depths, were mentioned a few times.
So we moved on and tried to expand on these themes, we looked at how we could show zombies coming out of the depths and what kind of superhero we could have:
At first we tried frozen pictures but quickly moved on to pieces that moved:
We then added some text and, by the end of a hard day, we had got a story together that combined all the different elements. It's all about a girl who turns into a zombie and raises a zombie army and there's an old Voodoo lady, an angel from a graveyard and a girl with lasers in her eyes... The rest of the week will be about creating a story out of this, that most people (if not everyone!) will be able to understand!
Next Saturday sees a new session underway, this will be the first full session under our new name and we are really excited about all the fun workshops that will be taking place.
On top of our normal class work, our senior group will be involved with the 'Festival of the Guild' - we have some really ... interesting... ideas to celebrate the history of the Arts Guild and rehearsals begin next Saturday!
Last night saw the first ever public performance of our new play '100 Days', it went down really well with all the senior actors really putting their all in to the show.
We had a really exciting day today with our final Trinity Guildhall Exams as GYT. Needless to say our students didn't let us down! We had fantastic results!
P 1-2 all received a Gold Performers Award
P3-4 received a Distinction with 87%
P5-7 Charlie's Wind received a Distinction with 89%
The first ever GYT Shakespeare Group received a really high merit of 82%
The other Shakespeare group gained Distinction with 85%
And finally our seniors received a hard-earned Distinction in Grade 6 Plays in Production with 87%.
The examiner spoke extremely highly of all the young people and commented on how inclusive and open we were, here's hoping we can keep up this great work as we become the Beacon Youth Theatre!
We are in the middle of a very exciting time here at Greenock Youth Theatre. A week tomorrow is our certificate day, where all our young people take part in Trinity Guildhall Drama Certificates. If you missed our letter out to parents with the Certificate times this week then you can download it here. We have an excellent past record doing these, so here's hoping this years lot do just as well as their predecessors!
In other news, we will be officially changing our name to Beacon Youth Theatre on the 10th of March. This is extremely exciting news as the BYT is right at the heart of the new Beacon Arts centre plans for the future and we can see there being a tremendous amount of opportunities ahead for our young people. One example of this is the donation of £100,000 towards the Youth Theatre by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation (see Lord Webber below, checking out the half-built theatre!). This will pay for top-class facilities and equipment that will make a difference for every BYT class.
