TRAPPED - AUDITIONS - Tuesday @ 1st November, 2011

Bring your little brothers and little sisters!  Bring your grandchildren and children - this is a new piece for children in school years 2,3,4,5 and 6 - 5:30pm - 6:30pm at BYT...   Give us a bell if you need to know more 01282 427767

Trapped - a new play for our Junior Children - auditions TUESDAY

On Tuesday at 5.00pm we have an audition for a new play TRAPPED.  This is a play about a young boy trapped inside a computer game. There's loads of characters for children in year 2,3,4,5 and 6. Come along!  See you there. 

People, we are a Building. People, we are an organisation. People, we are a youth theatre.

Making not Watching and the art of generosity. A cautionary tale...

We want to develop a youth theatre where all young people have the opportunity to create theatre as well as the opportunity to watch it.  As part of our successful NPO bid we have been asked to develop BYT as a receiving theatre.  This means that as well as offering young people the opportunity to participate, we are also looking for young people (and their families) to become an audience.  It has occurred to me - slowly as I am actually quite dim some times - that these are not necessarily the same thing. Young people who want to perform are not necessarily the same as young people who want to watch theatre...

Some years ago - well back in the beginning of time when I had escaped teaching and was living the life of the artist starving in the garret and actually having a good laugh getting reviews in The Independent,

 'Comic duo, Say So, sweating profusely under the lights,...'

if that counts -  I began to realise that as funny as we were (well, as funny as Carmen Walton, my comedy partner was) we were not going to be the next French and Saunders because all of the people who came to our shows (with the honourable exception of the poor bloke we dragged off Newton Street into the Frog and Bucket - imagine his startled face as we began our 'hilarious' routine) harboured the desire to be who we were, and to make their own work. All of them were, like ourselves, interested in what other people were doing, and occasionally even bought their wares but all of them, like ourselves, were actually more interested in making our own work.  We sold 500 books and thought we were someone.  We were someone - just not quite who we imagined ourselves to be.  We were on radio one with Mark and Lard.  We were regulars on local radio, finding new and inventive ways to steal our BBC passes as we left... I had 20 at one point. We sat in the green room with The Two Fat Ladies (and YES you could tell the difference.)  We laughed when we saw the soft shoes of a famous news reader... and in the end we just came to an end, in the way of all things.

We also shamed ourselves on a number of occasions during performances - we were bad for each other in that sense.  I famously fell over in Mid Pennines offices - I was out of control! I regularly corpsed (a problem that plagues me to this day) and on at least one occasion I regret being less than generous watching a poet who was using an orange in her set to symbolise a planet whilst wearing ski boots - this seemed inextricably hilarious at the time and we were barking with laughter and had to be removed from the room. We knew we were out of order, and we behaved badly.  What goes around comes around.

This was in the days before You Tube.  This was when you had to go out to hear what was going on in the world, and where the audience was largely tolerant because soon enough they would be up there delivering their own work.

It is a very different landscape now but I still have this sneaking suspicion that the urge to create your own work is at least equal to the urge to watch other people's. I wonder how often any of us really take time to watch and consider the work of those who are around us?  Yes, I visit the theatre regularly, and yes I read books, but which predominates - watching or making?  Perhaps it is different for different people? I don’t know the answers to these questions, I am merely posing them.  How do I encourage our young people to come and see work here, even if it is not quite to their taste?

At the youth theatre, we are developing a policy of positively encouraging the young people to watch other work. This is underpinned by the belief that you do not necessarily develop your theatre skills in the isolation of the rehearsal room.  Our notions of what constitutes theatre - what it is and what it can be - is shaped by what we see as well as what we experience.   Burnley is NOT a cultural oasis but many theatre companies don't necessarily seek us out as a venue even though we are the perfect size to house new and interesting work, and even though we are working towards doing just that. We want to offer our young people the opportunity to see work that might otherwise go unseen, to challenge what they understand as theatre and encourage them to take risks with their own work.  Nothing amazing was ever produced in a comfort zone. This does not just mean watching live theatre - both within our own space and on trips to other buildings - this term we have hosted Contact Theatre, M6 Theatre, and in a couple of weeks, we’ll be showing Red Riding Hood by Horse and Bamboo but directing young people to clips on You Tube or other websites where work is uploaded and demands attention and why we will be going to the Edinburgh festival again too.  Yes, sometimes work may be strange and unsettling, or perhaps not fully realised but to make theatre is to engage with a process of developing the best way of saying what needs to be said even if it falls short of what was imagined.

It is something else too.  We feel it as a deep and profound responsibility that we are charged with developing young artists - young people who are discerning about theatre, who are able to articulate what makes something good or bad, and who strive to make their own work original and challenging.  And equally, and no less important that they understand that they share that journey with many other artists and individuals some of whom have different talents to themselves, and who come from very different place or who strive for different meanings, and different ways of telling.  We are absolutely committed to the development of generosity.  If someone is wearing ski boots, and uses an orange as a prop it's okay to gently question the purpose of this, and suggest there might be a different way of working.

Ultimately, we feel that we have an immense role to support the young people who come to the youth theatre - the 450 who rock up week after week - to become fully engaging, thoughtful, passionate human beings.  Because in the end, whether you are making or watching theatre (or any of the arts) you are engaged in social action, political or non-political and that has a considerable consequence both now and in the future.  It is not easy.  Young people need to be convinced by the need to see other work - and this is a journey we are beginning to take.  We would welcome any suggestions about how we engage young people in this process.  I can’t make them come to see the work here - but I passionately want them to.

ps if you want a copy of 'Something Piggy and Unappealing' I still have a few hundred in the cellar.

WHO SAYS WE CAN’T GET 500 LIKES ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE IN A FORTNIGHT?

The Power of Social Networking

I’ve been puzzling a while about Social networking.  So, firstly – I’ll explain where we are, and then my thoughts on why we’re not quite where I want us to be…and how we might get there.  In the last month or so, after it stalled, I’ve been working really hard to encourage people to like our Facebook page… I’ve managed to persuade very nearly 200 people in that time to like the page.  Well, I want to get to 500 likes in a Fortnight.  Is it possible?  What can you do to help?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Burnley-Youth-Theatre/172630009436137


Read on, Macduff. 

WHERE WE ARE NOW...

Social networking…

We know that social networking, and digital content are crucial to our success and our future development.

We have leapt forward exponentially as an organisation and are now active on many social networking sites, and are becoming more savvy about how to use these platforms can enhance the experience of the young people within the organisation, and how people can find out more about us and stay involved – in the conversation, in shaping the future, in having their say about what we’re doing now, and what we might do in the future.   

We can be found on Twitter @BurnleyYT – and if you’re on Twitter you can sign in and follow this blog easily enough.  We’re on Facebook – like us http://www.facebook.com/pages/Burnley-Youth-Theatre/172630009436137

or follow us on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/YouthTheatreBurnley?feature=mhee

Or go and take a look at our photos on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56959443@N03/

If you know or have any ideas about the best way to develop social networking and the best ways of contacting you, let us know.  We’re all ears. 

Social Network Archive…

We are working our way through uploading our archive.  This is a difficult job!  Burnley Youth Theatre came into being in 1973 – that’s almost 40 years of photos, posters, films, press releases and so on and so forth.  But bit-by-bit, more of our archive goes up.  More recent, digital stuff is easier to share.  But a lot of photos have been scanned and are ready to go – but all of this is done in my spare time, pretty much so given that I’m quite busy this is sometimes the thing that gets squeezed out.   If you’ve got any photographs you want to share, or any memories, please go to our Facebook page and share this with us…

Connecting other groups…

Ollie Briggs (who is fab and who I connected with on Twitter) is working with us to develop an Internet tool so that we can have an online conversation with other groups about the content of pieces and maybe in the future an online festival of work!   This will be purpose built and will give a forum to extend the conversation of in this case, a devising process.  The site will be limited to those involved at the moment (groups from Bury and Darwen are working with us on this) so that it’s a closed conversation.   This is a really exciting development, and I think has untold potential within the youth theatre as a whole, and in developing us as a hub of youth theatre practice. If you’d like to take part in this conversation let us know… In the meantime, we’re pleased to hear from all of our friends and chatting to them about possibilities… get in touch…

Digital Content…

We are ambitious about developing content.  This year, in Edinburgh, our young people returned enthused by the possibilities of projection and we will be using projection within our Christmas show for the first time this year.  This is a particularly exciting development – and we’re pleased to be working with the genius that is Anthony Briggs (no relation to Ollie, although being called Briggs clearly helps!) to support it happening.  

We know that film, projection, and digital stuff is easy to generate, and we’re brave enough to share rehearsals and raw content on our You Tube.  There’s some very edited material there, but also improvisations from the Rep Company, and footage from our recent trip to Shakespeare’s Globe…

Today at a fundraising event we were using camera, flip camera and a hd video camera... And this is a regular thing for us...

WHERE I WANT US TO BE (and what you can do about it)

So, here’s what I really want to talk about.  We are open minded about possibilities through content and through sharing our ideas, thoughts, and in trying to advertise what is happening at the youth theatre at any given time.   But I am acutely conscious that we are not making full use of the networks open to us.   And it has taken me a really long time to work out why…

People don’t always use their social networking pages for very much at all.  Why should they? They use them to connect with their buddies, to check up on family – as a means of chatting to school friends (and sometimes arguing) or whatever, as a means of belonging to a particular social group.  My experience this year has suggested that people generally don’t see their social network as more than a single collection of people. Their people. I think, and I could be wrong, that for a lot of people – and particularly young people, social networking is about reaching out and belonging.  It’s not about the network (s) in and of itself.  It’s not about the possibility of that network (or indeed the networks of each of their 130 friends.) 

Without trying to sound like some young and funky thing, anyone who knows me knows that I am a massive fan of social networking tools, and an equally massive fan of gadgets. I was among the first wave of iPhone users (still the best design in my view), and am, and have always been, interested in the power of the network. Networks can change the world.  Long before social networking pages on the Net, campaigns operated a ‘phone tree’ to generate a quick call to action.  Each person on the list might ring an additional two people, and they might ring two and then 100 people would be standing in a demonstration stopping something terrible happening… that’s how social networks worked then and that’s when they worked effectively. And that’s the principle I am interested in looking at now.

Networks are everything; the means by which we extend, expand and grow – how we connect to others and how they connect to us.  Long before the social networking tool was created, networks existed.  Networks are made of people or places that are tied together by one (or a number) of ‘interdependencies’ (Wiki, accessed 16^th October 2011) – and each of us has many: family, friends, school, interests, work, beliefs, or knowledge, for example.

Without trying to sound exploitative, I make use of my Facebook network (I have 2, a work and a personal one).  75 of my Facebook friends like BYT’s Facebook page. This is about a 5^th of my friends, and they do it because I ask them to.  I am convinced of the value of them knowing about what we are doing EVEN if they live miles away and are never likely to come to the youth theatre. Why?  Because people will then know about what we are doing, and about who we are and maybe reconsider youth theatre.

An average Facebook user has 130 friends – if all the young people, ex-participants, workers, volunteers and interested others who currently 'like' us and that are already connected to us asked a 5^th of their friends to like our Facebook page 9,984 (based on 384 currently liking the page) would immediately like us.   This means that almost 10,000 people would know about the professional shows that we have on at BYT, for example or learn about projects or access other information about us.  Why is this important?  Even if no one ever comes to the show, they see details of what we do and our profile is immediately raised.  So, why not ask your friends to like out page?  And then ask them again?  Offer them a link.  Make it easy for people to support us in this way.  Explain why it is important to you.  Explain why it is important to us.  The more people who know about us, connect with us, communicate with us, the better argument we can make to our supporters that we are what we say we are – a vibrant youth theatre serving a wide community.   And the more likely we are to be able to explain what we do to funding bodies.

And this is another thing.  If a 5^th of people like the Facebook page – that still leaves 104 (on average) that don’t.   What should we do about them?  Well, once a week maybe, you could share a story from BYT on your newsfeed.  If you did this, based on the average number of Facebook friends, an additional 40,144 people would see stories about us.  Can you see why it matters?  40,000 people hear about us, see that we’re a vibrant, busy organisation… and just think if they shared it – well you do the maths!   And if you simply see this as advertising exercise – it’s colossally powerful and saves us huge amounts of money.  If we printed 40,000 leaflets this would cost £500 for each set.  If stories were shared as described every week we would actually be benefitting from about £26,000 a year of free advertising!  It’s amazing!

This would be more than just extraordinary advertising for us.   This would be an extraordinary raising of our profile.  This would mean that people would find out about us who might never have known about us.  It means that we can really start being what we are charged with – a hub of youth theatre activity, a small venue catering for small and medium sized touring shows, a really high profile arts company with an effective socially networking process.

This is just one thought about social networking.  I have many.  Just one way of looking at it…what do you think?  I'm not suggesting this is it's only use either...

We are keen to know your thoughts.  Whoever you are, wherever you are.  I sometimes think the social network thing is all smoke and mirrors, and I’d be better off buying Karen Barnes a mega-phone and sending her down town on a Saturday to tell people what we’re up to. (To be fair, she doesn’t actually need the mega-phone…)

Do social networking sites work?

You tell me.  Better still – show me.  Who says we can’t get to 500 likes on our Facebook page in a fortnight?

I’ll save some of them...

I don’t know whether anyone else feels like this but the second young people are in the full glare of the media for inexplicable acts of violence, I start to feel my liberal heart beat a bit faster.  I like to think I know young people and that, on the balance of probability, they wouldn’t – generally – do anything so terrible as loot, burn and destroy everything in their sight.  Would they?

Yes.  They would.  They have.

I begin to calculate my defence of these young people.  I prepare what I’m going to say that will contextualize their behaviour, at least.  I struggle with this –everything clogging up the words in my throat before they have fully formed. 

I have spent a career - a life choice I have been happy to make – working with young people, many of them disaffected. The truth is, I have chosen to work with young people because I passionately believe in investing time and effort in the next generation.  Because it’s worth it.  Because they are the future.  My work has paid me back a thousand fold in job satisfaction and in not just feeling but in evidenced certainty that the work done does make a tangible, real difference.   I have seen young people go from angry to engaged, from downhearted to upbeat.  I have seen a little light switched on.  Not always, but often, engaging in arts projects of one kind or another has given young people an opportunity to shine., to feel heard, to feel like someone somewhere cares about what they might want to say.

But here – the riots - was something different.  Here was something akin to lawlessness, a group of young people running amok as if life had not meaning at all.  As if, the police don’t matter, or the law and order is nothing, as if politician and community leaders are dust and as if being caught or not being caught was utterly irrelevant.  What did it mean?  How could I read it?  Could I justify it sociologically or some other way? How could I defend the indefensible?

It was at that point , I suppose, that the raw human reaction took over.  It was a terribly uncomfortable place to be – outraged of Rossendale momentarily and then just as certain that young people – even these young people, need people still to believe that they are worth trying to save.  I found myself hiding from the social media too, even abandoning my Facebook page after coming unstuck when some accused me of ‘unilateral’ views because I kept banging on about society and context and the fact that young people don’t operate in a vacuum.  What are they supposed to do when MPs steal?  When journalists can’t be trusted, when those in authority telling them to behave better can’t behave themselves?  When the entire society is built on endless consumption, the pointless acquisition of things?  

“Condemn the act,” I kept saying, “Don’t condemn the young people.”  And yet on it went.  Many people I know, love and care about – even some in my own family wanted to flog, or string up young people.  The irony of the violence of the reaction was not lost on me.  I was dis-comforted by my own sense of outrage and that my friends and colleagues were calling for these young people’s heads.

And therein lies the problem.  It’s not binary.  Beyond the acts of violence it is not simply a matter of right and wrong.  Young people are complex – like anyone.  And context is everything.

Against this, at Burnley Youth Theatre, we work with a range of young people who are dedicated, interested and completely committed to delivering amazing work that represents a different picture.  You could suggest that the young people we are working with are a completely different cohort– middle class, engaged, supported by parents and with present fathers – and of course, you would be wrong.  Our young people are entirely representative of young people everywhere – they are a cross section of society.  Some have little.  Some have a lot. Some live with grandparents and some in children’s homes.  Some have experienced violence and some struggle with basic literacy. Some are likely to go to Oxbridge.  Some are young carers and some are young people with a criminal record.  Some have special needs and some do not.  Some are wheel chair users, and some come to us without a decent meal inside them.  Some have parents with grave difficulties of one kind or another.  Others are the antithesis of this – they have some or all of the privileges that life offers.  

And another point that’s worth making.  Not all of our young people are perfect.  They some times behave badly.  They some times make mistakes.  But we don’t give up on them. 

 The point?  It would be very easy to get carried away and make all sorts of knee jerk responses that punished – as should be the case – the act, but abandons the young person in the process.  If we want young people to be engaged, then we have to invest in them.  We have to develop a means of engaging them fully in the world; a difficult proposition when funds are being cut but no investment in young people is not an option.  And investment is not just about money.

To finish, an apocryphal story:

A man is standing on the beach.  All around his feet are starfish, hundreds and hundreds of starfish that will die if they are not in the sea.  He leans down, picks up a starfish and throws it back into the sea.  Each new wave brings more starfish to the shore.  And each time he just carries on, leaning down, picking up starfish and throwing them back.

A passerby walks towards him and asks,   “What are you doing?”

“I’m picking up the starfish, and throwing them back.”  He says.

The passerby shrugs, says, “That’s ridiculous.  You’ll never throw them all back.  You’ll never save them all.”

“No,” the man says, “No.  But I’ll save some of them.”

History is a Mighty Drama...

"History is a mighty drama, enacted upon the theatre of time...” Thomas Carlyle

I have spent a good part of the weekend uploading archive photographs to our Facebook and Flickr profiles.  Not because I don’t get out much - although I don’t, but because it is important to be reminded of the bigger picture and to see where the youth theatre has come from, metaphorically and literally.  The youth theatre isn’t the same now as it was in 1973 - we’re in a different building, and the young people in the photographs are not young people any more. And a steady stream of young people come and make the youth theatre their own.  But how can any of what we do now have happened without what went before?

I have only managed to upload a selection of photographs from 10 discs - there’s at least a further 100 to explore (and tons of photos on our server too.)  There’s such a lot of history!  In uploading photographs, you start to get the feeling that you are part of something much bigger than yourself.  This is of course, on one level, obvious. Each day doesn’t spring completely detached from the one that went before rather grows organically. Yet the response has been phenomenal.   People have been leaving messages all day about this memory, or that memory, naming this person or that person or joking about costume, or asking for photographs from other things. You realise then that the shows, and the projects, and the participation in the youth theatre is special.  It matters to people. You realise that the work we do is often a very intense experience for young people, asking them, as we do to step outside of their comfort zones, to take risks and to step up to the plate.  You realise that you offer young people a place to learn to be themselves, supported by their peers and in absolute safety.

In a recent conversation about bullying with one of our older participants, I was thrilled to hear him say that he knew that no one was ever going to bully him here at the youth theatre, that he’d always known that and that everyone else knew that too.  “You’re allowed to be who you are,” he said, “That’s why we want to be here.” It’s this sense of belonging amongst other things that people recall so fondly when they see pictures of themselves in ‘The tales of the snot monster’ or ‘Harold and Maude’ circa 1993.

It’s a curious thing too that when you look at the pictures - the youth and the enthusiasm of youth is trapped in time.  The sense of possibility is evident wherever you look.  Then you realise that the picture is from 1979 (and that Anthony Preston is wearing a polo neck jumper) and that he’s not 18 any more.  He’s a good bit older than that.

It’s at that point that you start to remember that the youth theatre was fully established in 1973, almost forty years ago.  By my calculations that is 38 years ago. As anyone who knows me well will know maths is not my strong point but even I can calculate that this is an awful lot of shows, a serious number of projects, and a colossal number of workshops that have taken place since then.  And who knows how many countless young people have passed through our doors in all that time?  And how many of their parents have volunteered to support us?

I started thinking then.  Where are they now?  Amazingly, some people are still involved - Stephen Cook, Pauline Ray, Alicia Foley and Moira Preston are on our board.  The Garth Jones and Ian Galbraith are there too, for example parents who came to offer support and who’ve stayed long after their children have moved on.  And then there are others, like Philip Hindle who still play an active role, as director and workshop leader.  Still others, like Anthony Preston who support us from a distance.  But the rest?  I would love to hear from people who came 40, 30, 20, 10 years ago.  I’d love to hear about what the youth theatre meant to them.  I’d love to hear what they are doing now and what difference, if any, BYT made to their lives.

I realised that within these archives is more than our history.  There’s our future too.  The youth theatre, like all arts organisations, needs its supporters, its believers and here within these pictures are those who can play that role.  This can be active or low key, pro-active or subtle, but just writing a comment on Facebook allows us to demonstrate support - it shows those trusts and other organisations who back us financially the evidence that what we do matters.

It’s more than that too. Parents bring their children to the youth theatre, and like local schools, those children grow up, and then eventually bring their children too. It’s that kind of place. The people in these photos support our shows, share their love of the old place and join up the dots for us.  I think we could do better at helping people get back in touch, stay involved or simply join our database and mailing lists.  This doesn’t mean volunteering and being saddled with manning the tuck shop every Monday night until the end of time (although some people like Moira and Pauline are still there, selling sweets week after week - and they love it and we love it that they do!) But ex-participants and their parents could simply join our social network sites - Facebook and twitter and flickr and You Tube - to name but four, or simply come along and see a show.  In the next year we will be increasingly hosting professional companies and their work, as well as continuing to develop our own productions, films, original work and sharing events.

Things are not the same as they used to be.  They are not the same as they were in 1973 or indeed in more recent history - for more reasons than there’s time to write here. (Think of policies and safeguarding for one!)  Nor should we simply think of history as something that just teaches us lessons - to limit the use of history to lessons is, in my view, to miss the point.  As Henry Kissenger said, history ‘teaches by analogy, not by maxims.’ In that way history sets us free. It allows us to seek out the similarities in what went before - and celebrate these - without having to see what happened before as the only way to do things.  History isn’t a blueprint.

And what are the similarities? Well, from a quick survey of the archive and people’s responses to it and our own young people too - youth theatre is about enjoyment, having a laugh, participation, working together to a common aim, striving for (and sometimes failing!) to reach a goal, overcoming nerves, developing confidence, developing self-discipline, sometimes getting off with someone you fancy, being creative, having ideas, and so on... and so on... and this is common at whatever time in history youth theatre is taking place... then as now youth theatre is an intangible good.