After working with Alice Stevens the year before to create RoadKill, Theatre Absolute were invited back to work with the school's media students - drama, music, and film. The premise of the project was to explore and celebrate the culture of the school, not simply its classrooms and its teachers, but the idea of what the school meant to the students, and how large and personal a part of their life it is.
This notion was pertinent to Alice Stevens because it is a broad spectrum school, and it educates young people who have some degree of difficulty coping in mainstream education.
The students at AS are incredibly warm and talented and they approached the project with hearts of gold, a will to succeed, and a determination to explore their school both good and bad, in an honest and open way. Theatre Absolute's writer/director Chris O'Connell, associate artist Georgina Egan, and film maker Jay Langdell, were all involved in the project.
Initially, the students selected areas of the school that had a resonance for them on a personal level, whether it be the benches under the trees at the end of the field, the fence that abutts the mainstream school of Whitley Abbey, (a sometimes mocking neighbour), the smoking area in a dingy wet corner at the farside of the playground, or the quiet room, or the art room. And so on. They wrote words that captured these places. At the end of the session, with words contributed by 25+ students, Chris went away to use every single word, and wrote a short play/poem that became known as School Is.....
The play was elliptical and non-linear, it had no over arching narrative in any traditional sense, but one set of words led to another to create a poetic and imagist portrayal of the school as seen by these students. It being only 20 minutes long, Georgina started to rehearse the play with the drama studnts. Chris and Jay worked with the music students, who scored a drifting atmospheric soundscape, and the film makers, under Jay’s supervision, filmed a series of montages inspired by the play, and conducted a series of interviews with staff at AS to investigate the culture of the school from their point of view.
By the end of the week, three strands had been created and the project had been named A Day In The Life of Alice Stevens. On a beautiful hot Friday afternoon in late May, the whole of the school gathered in the school hall. The film was shown first, and then the students, to the composed music, which had been pre-recorded, performed the play School Is... for their peers, and for the staff of Alice Stevens.
We knew it at the time, and even now looking back, this was an inspirational project: moving and heart warming. It is a perfect example of how Theatre Absolute works best - putting aside issues, and unearthing and responding to the passions and the experiences of the people they are working with.
Theatre Absolute has a dynamic history of working with young people.
Education and access are crucial to the company, and first and foremost we place an importance on the stimulation of young people’s imaginations, and never the end result. Although excellence is always strived for, the priority of any work is to establish a working environment that is safe, exploratory, revelatory and fun!
With each new production a workshop programme is devised to ride in tandem with the production whilst on tour. It will offer both an insight into the method and approach the company takes to its work, and practical oppportunities for participants to find common creative ground both with each other, and with the company.
A typical workshop, usually held at the theatre venue, will be available to between 15 to 20 young people and lasts approximately 2 hours. The workshops are led by Theatre Absolute’s artistic director and writer, Chris O’Connell, with support from the actors in each production.
We were engaged by Creative Partnerships, Coventry, to work in a Pupil Referral Unit, called Centre 4. The plan was to work with year 10 students who were all excluded from mainstream education, and to encourage them to take part in sessions based around scenes from our award winning play Car, mainly to develop their confidence and self esteem as well as pick up skills in literacy and engage in an activity for a long period of time.
It was agreed we would work off site, and after starting with a huge group of eleven mad for it roustabouts at the first two sessions, over the ensuing weeks we established a core group of six who turned up ready and enthusiastic for work every Wednesday morning at a sports centre on the outskirts of Coventry. We played games - we did the usual stuff, but quickly realised that what was interesting to the six students, three girls, three boys, was the play, and the characters and the language within it.
We started to rehearse the opening scene, no words, only music and movement, and before we knew it we were rehearsing the second and third scenes, and the students were reading it out loud. This, we were told by the teachers assisting us, was an enormous step forward - for the students to read not only aloud, but in front of each other was unheard of. The spirit of the project was positive and affirming and, as we'd hoped, relationships were built and when it ended with a one off performance by the students a week before Christmas, to their fellow students, and teachers and parents, we were all gutted that it had come to an end.
This work was incredible, we hope as much for the students as much as for us, and we continued the relationships through into rehearsals for Hang Lenny Pope this February and March, where they came in to watch how we worked in a theatre context and how many of the skills they learnt during the project time, were transferrable: confidence, concentration, patience and understanding of not only one's own needs, but others.
City College and Theatre Absolute first made useful links with each other in October 2005, as we built up to the premiere of cloud:burst, and were hosted by the college in the studio space first for a technical week, to put the show together, and then as a preview space in which we tried out the play for the first time.
Following on from this, we created The Works, a hands on mentoring and 'apprenticeship' project for six students on the college's B-Tec theatre arts course. It was simple. They were to follow the making of Hang Lenny Pope, from workshop through to first night. They were able to witness the development of work on an independent theatre level and be present for all production meetings, production week, premiere, and some of the rehearsals. Crucially, a key part of the relationship was about their response to the play, and they created a ten minute response to Hang Lenny Pope, tapping into what they felt were its major themes and emotions.
NB. The Works was hosted again as The Works II, with Cardinal Newman School, Coventry, during the making of Zero, 2008.
Taking the latest production, Hang Lenny Pope, as the starting point, Chris O’Connell worked with actors from the company to explore major components at the heart of Theatre Absolute’s work. The participants were challenged to get to grips with the creation of an imaginative framework, with character, language, story, and soundscape. Often these components begin as the smallest of ideas, so how can they be worked up, and how do they become the spine around which Theatre Absolute makes its most exciting work?
All workshops were FREE to participants who booked to see performances of Hang Lenny Pope.
Post show discussions: writer Chris O’Connell and cast members were available for post show discussions.
NOTE: This type of workshop is offered with all of the company's core productions. It may be adapted and developed to suit the needs of the production it accompanies, but the words above give a flavour of what is offered.