michaelbeigel-blog

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We Did It!

The first few weeks of 2017 have been delightfully filled for me with Before a Fall the lastest production by Quartz - Theatre in the Quarter’s company for 12-20 year olds. They were fantastic, we did 3 brilliant shows at St Mary’s Creative Space and had lovely audience attendance and feedback throughout.

I would like to begin with a word of thanks, to all of you who came to see the show, parents who tirelessly brought the young people to rehearsals, the bar, front of house, stage management and all staff involved at St Mary’s Creative space, Matt Baker and all at Theatre in the Quarter for giving us this opportunity, this incredible group of young people, the wonderful Elaine, The Ginger Prince, Joe who it’s been a pleasure to work with again, and of course Julie without who none of this would ever happen - mainly because then we’d have to learn where they keep the tea bags.

Myself and the musical director Joe Mann had huge ambitions for this piece and wanted to challenge these young people in many different ways. Firstly to tell the extremely complicated stories of Icarus and Theseus & The Minotaur and the many interwoven links of Queen (in our production) Minos and family of Crete, King Aegeus and family of Athens and Poseidon, Hermes and the 12 Gods of Olympus. They told the story with great clarity and many of the audience commented on how much they had learnt!

The cast was required to sing in 2, 3 and 4 part harmonies throughout the varied songs in the piece. Their voices were accompanied by piano, electric guitar, bass and drum kit as well as a number of acoustic instruments played by the young people with great skill. Clarinet, flutes, violin, guitars, ukulele, trumpet to name a few.

Two members of the cast flew above the heads of the ensemble, supported by the young people themselves. The Minotaur was performed using a huge mask designed by artist Russell Kirk and further movement work was included in the dance sections of the piece. Not to mention creating a Labyrinth, two wars, the appearance of a magnificent cow out of the sea, Mount Olympus and other varied locations and stories.

Act one culminated in the moment when, during flight, Icarus flies too close to the sun and falls to her death and my ambition for how to tell this story was to go from a stage full of action to an empty stage with just some feathers falling. Now this meant that in the space of a blackout, that I wasn’t willing for it to be longer than 10 seconds, we had to go from a a stage full of 35 actors with costumes, props and instruments, including an actor being carried by 6 others, to an empty stage except for some descending feathers, and all of this obviously had to happen in the dark.

When I first suggested this there were a few raised eye brows, particularly from the stage management team who are ultimately responsible for the safety of the performers and audience alike. However, having seen the way these young people had been working up to this point and with a knowledge that we had the time to work this through with rigour they were willing to try. The maturity and professionalism with which these young people approached this moment meant that each night we were well capable of getting the actor down safely, all 35 cast members clear of the stage in the pitch black and all in less than half the time I was originally willing to accept. And, yes of course, I got my feathers.

For me this was just one example of the excellent attitude with which these young people have approached this project - they of course have areas to develop, as all actors do at any stage in their training. This cast is no different except that to their credit many of the young people are inquiring what these areas are and how they can improve. It is a combination of these open and inquiring minds, professional attitudes and inherent, nurtured and developed talent that make this group so inspiring to work with and able to achieve such complex theatre productions.

I am immensely proud of this ensemble of young actors and of the show we created. It more than lived up to my expectations and achieved all the many varied ambitions I had for this piece. Joe and I are already excitedly planning the next project and how we can take the learning experiences we’ve had this term to push these young people further and teach them more new skills so that the next show they create can be even more ambitious!

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Up Where The Air Is Clear...

So over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been flying! As part of preparations for Quartz’s - Theatre in the Quarter’s Young Company for ages 12-20 - upcoming show Before a Fall we have been doing a lot of movement work. For those of you looking forward to seeing the fruits of our labour the performance dates are 8th, 9th and 10th of January at St Mary’s Creative Space, tickets will be available soon!

The movement work we have been doing has been serving a number of different purposes as part of the storytelling for this piece. We are embracing the Greek chorus style and are telling a lot of the story through ensemble movement work. This of course does not happen over night and we have been workshopping about building trust and confidence between the performers, ensemble improvisations and sculptural work.

We also got out a load of string last week and got in a good old tangle! String is a bit of a theme for this piece and I hope it will all become clear. But here’s us having a bit of play.

The other thing we have been working hard on is getting people flying. I was a touch nervous about this going into rehearsal and actually after the running the warm up I was concerned that it was going to be a step too far. However, after a bit of a chat and a massive improvement in concentration these young actors pulled it out of the bag, engaging in the preliminary contact improvisations and proving to me they were ready to take off. And, well see for yourself!

It’s all starting to come together and this week we’re going to attempt a stagger through of the entire play. It’s been a while since we’ve done bits of the play, and some bits we’ve not yet looked at. But I’m hoping things will slot together nicely and we can begin to polish and finesse from there! We shall see...

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Callbacks

Last week was half term for most of the schools in Chester and I took this opportunity to try and break the back of the work for Before a Fall - the new title for the play based on the Icarus and Theseus Myths that I am directing with Quartz. Quartz are Theatre in the Quarter’s young people’s company, aged between 12 - 20 they are a very talented bunch!

We separated the week into calls, meaning not everyone was there all the time, and in fact some were not there at all - these talented young people are always very much in demand from other commitments!

But we were lucky enough to have some of the young people in for a band call and we had clarinets, flutes, guitars, a violin, trumpets, a saxophone, an accordion and I’m sure I’ve missed some! They are all very accomplished musicians - able to pick up music very quickly and create a nicely balanced band dynamic in a very short space of time. Joe Mann, the Musical Director was both very impressed by their musicianship and delighted about the sound world that we will be able to create thanks to this group of musicians, and not everyone could attend so there is more to come!

I also started looking at some of the scenes in more detail and I was very impressed with the maturity and skill these young actors brought into the room. I worked with them in a similar way I work with professionals and they adopted techniques and a style of working that was often brand new to them. They grasped the ideas of given circumstances and how these affect the drama, I touched on some Laban work, we unit-ed bits of the script as well as developing an ensemble dynamic. All this while multi-rolling, working in the round (well, square) and due to the nature of the calls, not moving through the piece from the beginning logically following the narrative.

Joe and I are constantly impressed by these young people and their wonderful attitude, what this means is that we are able to keep pushing them and introducing new ideas and ways of performing to them. And it means I can direct these young people as actors, not members of a ‘youth drama club’.

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In the square?

The latest step on our journey to creating our adaptation of the Greek myths Icarus and Theseus was to go to visit St Mary's Creative Space. Myself and Joe have been working with Quartz, a group of 35 young people aged 13-20 from across the Chester area for the last 3 weeks and are putting plans together for the production in January.

I got very excited whilst at St Mary's Creative Space because I had the chance to have a good look at the venue we will be performing in and, more importantly, to get my teeth stuck in to what we want to do with the place!

We’ve decided we want to perform with audience on all sides, and as there are 4 beautiful pillars that dominate the space, we have decided to embrace these as part of the architecture of our world. We will have rows of audience between them so that we are performing not in-the-round but ‘in-the-square’.

We will use Theatre in the Quarter’s platforms to create a raised seating area on at least three of the sides. Creating an audience rake that will mean everyone will have a great view that will create an amphitheatre / cauldron type atmosphere in the middle.

Typically as a director I was making bigger than possible demands and asking for as much as I could think of. One conversation went: - You’ve got four lighting stands, where would you like them? - Well, it’d be great to have two there, two there and one on either side there and there. - That’s six. You’ve only got four. - Can we get six?

There’s going to be entrances on all sides and two slightly bigger entrances on opposing corners. In the other corner I have planned to have the ‘band pit’. I’ve not secured a band yet, or what that might involve but it’s always worth planning for one I think!

Below is a rough sketch I made of what the playing space is going to look like. You may notice it is not exactly to scale and that I’ve got a big confused between metres and feet at different points but I hope it gives some idea of what we are aiming to achieve and I hope you’ll be able to join us to see it for real when we perform in January.

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And We’re Off!

(NOTE: I wrote this blog last week but didn’t want to publish it before we had full confirmation on a few things. Thankfully we now have that confirmation, so here’s what I was thinking!)

Quartz is properly back up and running now, in full swing and embarking on an exciting ambitious new project. And there are a few developments I want to share with you all.

Firstly, we are moving home. We have been very happy in the Garden Lane Methodist Church and will certainly be using it again we hope. But we have such a brilliant large group this term we have decided we needed something a bit larger scale. And we are delighted to have the opportunity to move homes to the brand new facilities at Blacon High School! We will be some of the first people to enjoy the state of the art facilities and cannot wait to get settled in to our new home from next Tuesday.

Secondly, our performance dates have now been confirmed. We will be performing at St Mary’s Creative Space on January 8th, 9th & 10th 2017 (2017 - I know, as if!) this exciting versatile venue will be our setting and we’re excited to use this space in ways you may not have seen it used before.

Finally, a little bit about the show. We will be re-telling and reinventing the myths of Icarus and Theseus & The Minotaur telling through puppetry, physical storytelling and musical theatre. Fusing aspects of Greek Chorus with contemporary theatre techniques this brand new adaptation will challenge performers and audiences alike and provide a new way into these classic tales. As the lines of the opening song say:

A story will change every time it is told, New lessons are learned as retellings unfold, And all that glitters is surely not gold.

Whether Gods or Men, Queens or Kings, Parents or Children, Monstrous things. All make the choices, when choice makes its call, Pride comes before a fall.

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We’re Back!

Tuesday just gone at Chester Blue Coat School we had the first workshop of this term of Quartz - Theatre in the Quarter’s Youth Theatre group for ages 14-20. We were very excited to be welcoming two practitioners from Liverpool based theatre company Tmesis to lead a workshop on physical storytelling.

It was great to gain some different insights on methods of creation and performance and the young actors engaged well and created some really entertaining improvisations. The show we will be creating this term has big demands in terms of storytelling and we will certainly be embracing aspects of this work as we go into rehearsals.

Another delight was how many young actors we had in attendence, we were hoping to have a similar number to last term, around the 18 mark maybe plus a couple more. In fact 31 walked through our doors: some returning from last term, some who have attended Quartz in the past, some who took part in the summer project For the Fallen and some who have made the step up in age group from Jigsaw. It was great to see so many new and returning faces and the standard of work last week alone has set a high bench mark.

It has sent me in to a bit of an excited frenzy, as I am also writing the show this term, I have been happily drafting and redrafting and rethinking how the storytelling can best suit this bumper crop of acting talent. I’m excited about the staging and increased scale we can now achieve and I can’t wait to hear them singing together. I know that together we have the opportunity to create a really delightful show and cannot wait for tonight when we get to embark on this journey proper!

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What a ride! - A and E, road closures and a change of trousers. All a part of your standard opening night!

Last Tuesday was the culmination of this term's Quartz - we performed Sinister Stories to a packed, if somewhat soggy, crowd at the Garden Lane Methodist Church.

We described it as a collage of work to showcase the skills practiced this term. And these young actors did not disappoint.

The show had a number of constituent parts including a section from Shakespeare's Macbeth (AGH!), a John Cooper Clarke poem, the lyrics to a Phil Collins song translated into German, text from Kneehigh Theatre company, as well as songs, and a section of physical theatre using Frantic Assemblies' Chair Duets (phew!). On top of this there were monologues and group work written and devised by the young people and all this squeezed into just half an hour!

Due to a trip to A and E for one of the cast, and other commitments (dance competitions, festivals, music exams - a typical weekend for these talented, busy young people) not to mention the near impossible transport situation last week due to the tempestuous weather, it all meant that the show was the first time we had run the whole piece with all the cast members! However they have been developing their skills as ensemble performers and really pulled together as a team. It was particularly lovely for me and Francis to be able to sit back and watch this company of actors grow into an ensemble - listening to each other, performing together and entertaining their audience.

There is of course always more to learn and it is a pleasure to say that these young actors are always up for the challenge, wanting to push themselves, happy to get out of their comfort zones, and to see what they can create.

It was brilliant to be able to share this show with so many friends and family and were delighted to hear the lovely feedback from those attending.

I am consistently heartened and kept on my toes by the energy these young people bring, constantly cheered by their beaming smiles but most of all I am proud of what these young actors have learnt and have proven to me throughout this term and to an attentive audience last night.

As for the change of trousers - well there was a lot of rain yesterday - and I ride a bike. Thankfully trousers dry, because for a good hour or so before rehearsals I was borrowing a pair of Francis' shorts. We like to coordinate outfits but that was a step too far.

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Flying Solo

This week in Quartz, as well as developing work from previous weeks and adding new dimensions with some vocal work and singing, I challenged these actors to become writers too.

They had all brought a ghost story they thought was interesting, some had brought more than one, but for this exercise they picked one. They all had paper and a pencil and I asked them first of all to distil the story into one sentence. A task that is harder than it sounds but I believe all great stories can be said in one sentence.

From here I let them increase their word count so that they had 3 sentences. One to describe the beginning, one for the middle and one for the end. One that describes the situation before - the set up, one that explains the event or main events that happen, and one that describes situation afterwards and how it has changed due to these events.

They then had just 10 minutes to write their monologue, without any more planning, just dive straight in and begin. This is an exercise called automatic writing and is often, I find, where I get my best ideas. The only limitation I gave them was that their monologue had to be no longer than 40 seconds.

After ten minutes of the most intense silence and concentration I stopped them and they performed their monologue to a partner who listened and offered some constructive feedback. Then one after another they performed these monologues to the group. I don’t know if you’ve ever written and performed anything but it is very exposing and takes an awful lot of bravery, particularly if you’ve only had 10 minutes to work on the thing!

These monologues were all very different, very interesting and very entertaining. The young actors - and now writers - got up and performed to each other without a shred of fear and rightly so, as an audience they were equally generous and supportive. These monologues will be developed through rehearsals and used as a basis in the show. But with this blog I wanted to acknowledge their efforts and I am in awe that this group produced 15 diverse monologues and performances (in less than half an hour!) with such immense confidence and conviction.

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The Sea Again...

Last week we focused on bringing to life the John Cooper Clarke poem I Mustn’t Go Down To The Sea Again. Building on work fantastic work from the previous week we developed this work further.

After a quick rehearsal which incorporated some new members, they performed this poem. It was brilliant! Stamping to keep a beat and accompanied by Tucker on a Cajon (a wooden box drum), they performed this poem as a vocal and physical treat.

The text was separated so that each performer had an individual line to speak as well as a common refrain shared in choral speech. The intentions and wants of each of these characters (built on work from week 1 & 2) were all clear and unique choices. The movement complimented the text and, separated in two groups, they performed the whole poem as one fantastically atmospheric piece.

From here we decided to see if we could push them further, we added in some body percussion - which they picked up in an instant - so that each group was accompanying the other group. We then stretched these versions so they were climatic and seemingly chaotic. As a contrast we then stripped all of this away, removing everything but the bare bones of percussion so that the text could sing out clearly, softly and eerily. All the versions we found were interesting and vibrant in their own ways and we’re looking forward to deciding how we can include these in our sharing.

Finally, we set them some homework to find some stories that will provide the basis for our final piece. We will develop these tonight and I can’t wait to see what these sparky young actors bring.

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'I want to do something challenging and that I'm proud of.'

Last Tuesday evening was the first session of this term's Quartz - Theatre in the Quarter's Young People's company established and nurtured from the outset under the careful eye of Steph Green and Matt Baker. This term will be run by myself (Michael Beigel) and Francis Tucker and it's fair to say beforehand we were nervous.

As always with first night nerves they were only a good thing. Tucker and I planned the session carefully - focusing on stagecraft and the skills required to make exciting theatre. And this dynamic group of Young Actors (for that's what they are) really rose to it.

In only an hour they devised, redrafted and honed a cornucopia of different scenes. Ranging from the surreal to the truly heartfelt. They absorbed the work we introduced surrounding playing scenes truthfully and really got their teeth stuck into finding out (and playing) what their characters want!

We also found out from these young actors why they are there. What are their ambitions for the project and beyond? We had a myriad of responses each as unique as the young person who provided them. One was

'I want to do something challenging and that I'm proud of.'

and this could be a headline for this term.

We will challenge these young actors - because they have already shown they are more than up to the task. And what's more we will make a piece of theatre that me, Tucker and all these young people can be immensely proud of.

If you would like to join Quartz for this term please call Julie on 07747 110933 as it's not too late to join!