Meg muses about Youth Theatre

For my younger readers:

Many people think that writers spend all their time slaving over a hot computer! Well, as you may have realised from my web-site, I don’t! In fact, I spend remarkably little time actually writing books. One of the other things I do is teaching youth theatre in the Mill Arts Centre, something I love. I run four companies, 5-7s, 8-11s (two companies) and 12-14s. There’s also a 14+ group but I don’t run that – I should think they’ve had enough of me by then!

We don’t ‘do plays’ as such – we devise our own material, a process I find very difficult to explain but it’s a lot of fun. If you want to know more, read my blog for wrinklies below!

If you live in the Banbury area, then we have a few spaces left for next term so you’re welcome to join – but they’re going fast! If you’d like to join a different youth theatre, then contact the National Association of Youth Theatres and see if there’s one in your area. They are all unique – unlike Stagecoach which is a very different thing and very expensive compared with youth theatre. You should have enormous fun, meet some great people and develop all sorts of skills you never knew you had!

For my more wrinkly readers:

Last week was performance week for me. All my four youth theatre companies were showcasing the plays they had created in their workshops this term, along with the various dance and other arts groups which train at The Mill Arts Centre in Banbury. A friend asked me ‘what we had done’. I found it incredibly hard and frustrating to try to explain briefly – a nerve had been touched – suddenly I wanted the whole world to know about the wonder of devising theatre with young people. So I decided it would be the subject of this week’s blog.

I first got involved in youth theatre almost by accident. I’d had to teach drama when I was teaching English – it just goes with the territory – and then, when I was home-educating, I started a home-edders drama group. When a job running the youth theatre group at The Mill for just two hours a week came up, I applied, feeling that I wasn’t properly qualified at all. No one else applied so I got the job – and promptly regretted it. I had a group of, I think 3 very disenchanted children to which I added my 2 daughters. One girl in particular sneered at or tried to undermine everything we did. It was very evident that she was only there because she fancied one of the boys. After a term of struggling with her, I refused to allow her to re-enrol – the only time I have ever had to do that – and from there we have gone from strength to strength. Four years ago a did an MA in Theatre and Drama Education, realising that this was an area I loved working in and that, for my own self-confidence, I needed to get qualified. It was a wonderful experience. There are now around 60 young people involved in 4 different companies and it looks like I might well start a second Minis company in the New Year, for 5-7 year olds. So what is it that I do and why do I feel so passionate about it?

I very quickly decided that for performances, we would devise and we would take a very physical approach. There were several reasons for this:

We were only being offered brief slots of about 20 minutes in the Showcases of youth arts, twice a year.
We have no budget for set or props and we get about half an hour per group with the technician before each run of performances!
Trying to find a play that would suit my clientele twice a year seemed like too much of a mission – now I’d be looking for 8!
I had only recently discovered the concepts of devising and physical theatre and I was very excited by both.
Most importantly, if you devise, you can, if you choose to, keep your whole group busy and having fun for almost 100% of the time. You can choose to have very little hanging around time which is crucial when you’re working with kids who, in most cases, have already done a day at school and may not have had time for tea. The last thing you want is them getting disgruntled because they’re bored!

I quickly found there were other advantages in this way of working too:

You can allow kids to choose how much involvement to have. They can speak or not speak, they can have bigger, key roles or hide away in the ensemble all the time. Obviously, this doesn’t always work out to everyone’s satisfaction but the potential is there, much more than if you are working from a script.
You use the kids’ own words to a large extent which gradually get honed over the weeks into something precise that they have learnt – but they don’t always have to say exactly the same thing and it rarely gets written down – so you avoid kids becoming very stilted and it isn’t necessary for company members to be able to read.
The companies are quite unusual in being about equally popular with boys and girls. I put this down to the hectic, physical, hardly-time-to-draw breath approach to a lot of what we do!

But I still haven’t described exactly what it is we do or what’s so wonderful about it! Well, here’s an attempt.

I take a bunch of 16 random kids (the maximum size I can work with in the space). There are no auditions - if you join the company, you perform. And I take a story or a theme – there’s some negotiation on this but not a lot. We may do some initial improvisation to flag up key points - but often we don't because time isn't on our side - basically we have 20 or so hours (or 10 for 5-7s) to get a show created during a performance term. I work out what scenes we need if it's a story - if it's a theme, it can be more open-ended. Then we set to and create the scenes - and that's where it gets really difficult to explain! Sometimes it's a case of working in groups to create parts of a scene which are then spliced together. Sometimes I'll create a script - very short speeches so everyone who wants a line can have one or more. Sometimes I'll suggest how I think a scene might go, we try it and the kids come up with massive improvements. When we're trying to decide who will have any leading roles, we'll improvise a key scene and then 'forum' it - ie. anyone who thinks they can do it in a different way can, in turn, have a go - and the scene we've used will become part of the piece. Sometimes one of the kids will just come up with something brilliant that we add in. When we've got a few scenes roughed out, we start running them together and they start getting honed down and suggestions are made for improvements and then we add more scenes and run again - and usually I panic because we're trying to do far too much in the time - and so it goes on until finally we have a pretty polished piece. And most they of the time, most of the people are on stage and busy and happy and have some ownership of what they've created. Our sets are rarely more than chairs and tables and the odd bit of cloth! We use some props (this time the youth art group made us a fantastic giant's head and tooth) and I made a puppet, but a large part of me loves our minimalist approach because drama is about the magic which happens within a space that we have defined as theatre and it is very liberating to be free of the clutter of set or any attempt at naturalism. And I love the fact that the kids can own what we have created and are, throughout the creative process, empowered to make their own contributions. And miraculously, they become an amazing team that covers for mistakes and people who are ill and affirm each other but spot what goes wrong and raise it, and most importantly, have a great deal of harmless fun. I don't know if parents understand - whether they expect something longer or more traditional or less ensemble or more naturalistic - but every time we perform, it feels like a small miracle has happened and that, for me, is the wonder of devising theatre - to take a group of people and a space and to be able to create something out of nothing. To see kids' confidence bloom and to watch even those who have come with a fixed idea of ‘acting’ become beguiled by what we do is a real joy and seems very precious. When I realise that I have inadvertently crushed someone, it is agony – but there becomes such a sense of togetherness in each company, that the members are very forgiving both of me and, on the whole, of each other. To a large extent, it’s just an extension of what children do anyway – though not enough in my view these days – and that is creative play. It's all so simple and yet in some ways so complex. I think it hits absolutely every principle I hold dear.

I used to think that what I most wanted to be was a writer. Now I’m not so sure. My hours of youth theatre are gradually increasing and I can think of ways of expanding the job. It would have to be at the expense of writing time. And which is more worthwhile? I don’t know! Your comments are very welcome! Thank you.