- Tales From The Keep: Legend of the Pot of Gold, The Exquisite Corpse; Memory of Water; and The Duke, The Gypsy, and the Poor Poor Girls. Studio 1, Dartington College of Arts, July 12 and 13
Totnes Young People’s Theatre has been exploring history with its latest round of performances, and with the ability to sell out a castle, they must be doing something right. Lee Morgan speaks to them to find out about the company’s creative processThere’s an informal buzz at Totnes Young People’s Theatre. Not least because we’re sitting on the floor in a theatrical studio at Dartington. It’s late afternoon and the sun is getting lower, shining gold on the wooden floors. The group itself begins to glow and shine as they find out what their next project will entail.
Totnes Young People’s Theatre has been awarded some dollops of cash from the Heritage Lottery Fund, with the proviso that the actors put on performances that are inspired by or investigate aspects of their heritage. So far it has seen the youngsters taking part in Tales From the Keep, which saw a procession and performances around Totnes Castle in an event that was opened out to other adult groups in the community and the general public. It was a success and more than a thousand people invaded the castle area to watch and take part.
The next project is called Tales from the Keep 2, and is an altogether different approach, and looks to be even more successful.
This time the link was to be with Berry Pomeroy castle, but due to demand the castle proved too small, and the production on July 12 and 13 has relocated to Dartington.
The eldest group of the Totnes Young People’s Theatre had a brief and a budget to produce their own performance. And it’s a testament to the structure of the company that they can carry it off and approach it with such relish.
The way the youth theatre works is with a mixture of script-based work and improvisation. Often they use a script as a starting point. And through a series of workshops with the support of the mentors and students from Dartington college of art the groups investigates themes, feelings, and scenes.
It’s an incredibly open way of working and the teams relies on a creative trust with the other members and facilitators.
“We take the point that a feeling can never be wrong. We can express them without fear of being judged,” says artistic director Tiffany Strawson.
Maddy of the groups says: ‘We’re comfortable with each other. And the experience of doing a show ties you to people too. Usually not everything goes as plans in the run up to a play, and that last minute panic brings everyone together.”
It’s a system that is intended to make people part of real theatre experience.
“For the actors, Tiff and Jon try to make a lot come from us, to make it more our idea,” says Sam.
“In Lessons from History we did a grandad scene which we devised that became part of the play. We were able to link children’s experience through the scripts.”
John and Tiff are Jon Croose and Tiffany Strawson.
It was Tiffany who established the theatre over four years ago as a development of the youth theatre at KEVICC, King Edward VI Community College. Now Totnes Young People’s Theatre caters for around 70 young people, from the age of nine, who have workshops every week with people who have a professional background in making theatre. Tiffany also has a strong connection to Devon Youth Theatre.
“Part of the artistic process here is in the devising. The rehearsal rooms are pretty free, creatively,” she says.
Jon, who is also artistic director of Means of Production Community Arts, and works freelance with Totnes Young People’s Theatre as a writer/director, says: “We set quite high expectations, and we don’t say things are good when they’re not.”
But that hasn’t dimmed the enthusiasm.
“It’s nice here,” says Sam. “Relaxed. It’s like you’re not treated as a student, but you’re given responsibility.”
And there’s a sense of belonging to the youth theatre as a whole, not just the age groups – the elder members talk with pride about another of the heritage-funded projects, which sums up the strength of the approach of the theatre and underlines the importance of drama.
Sam says: “One of the younger groups did a piece on the railway station that was bombed in the war. You don’t think of Totnes as being in the war. These are real people’s stories. And they made it more relevant to today. And you were able to put it into perspective.”
• Tales From The Keep will now take place at Studio 1 at Dartington College of Arts on July 12 and 13. The event will feature four plays about local history, including the mysterious Legend of the Pot of Gold, a Victorian murder melodrama set in Totnes entitled The Exquisite Corpse, and Memory of Water, a love story set against the backdrop of local raids by the 17th century Barbary pirates, who once stole children from South Hams villages to sell them into slavery.
Top of the bill for the event will be a new play The Duke, The Gypsy, and the Poor Poor Girls, which tells the story of the 19th century Seymour family and the real lives of poor women as recorded in parish Poor Law records. The play also introduces the tale of early aviator Albert Liewentaal, aka the Birdman of Dittisham, and the story of Ruth St Maur, illegitimate daughter of Ferdinand Seymour and a gypsy kitchen maid, who grew up to become a leading Suffragette and socialist revolutionary.
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June 13th, 2008
The weekly technology column from those good people at Plymouth’s
Orange Crate
In October 1992 a group of Japanese researchers organized a workshop in Tokyo to discuss challenges in the area of artificial technology. This gathering promptly gave birth to a serious discussion about using the medium of football to promote science and technology, and within nine months rules had been drafted, feasibility studies run, and prototype models designed.
And with great interest from scientific communities around the world, the Robot Soccer World Cup, or ‘RoboCup’ was born. The grand aim is to create, by the mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players who, by complying with the official rules of FIFA, will beat the winning team of the most recent FIFA World Cup.Sounds crazy doesn’t it? The idea of current robots outplaying the likes of recent Italian World Cup winners Alessandro Del Piero and Fabio Cannavaro is nothing short of laughable. But the folks at RoboCup have an interesting defence of their scheme. As they point out, it only took 50 years to get from the Wright brothers first aircraft to Apollo missions to send man to the moon. Likewise it took just 50 years from the invention of the digital computer to the creation of IBM’s Deep Blue, which beat reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov. And as the organizers rightfully assert, it’s important to set ambitious long term goals to be pursued and grappled with.
The RoboCup consists of a range of competitions based on size, technical ability and development, but arguably the pinnacle of the various classes is Humanoid League, where teams are formed by either two ‘kid-sized’ or ‘teen-sized’ robots. The winners of the 2 on 2 league in the 2007 meeting in Atlanta was Team NimBro from the University of Freiburg in Germany, who beat Team Osaka from Osaka University by a close margin of eight goals to six – sounds like both teams need to work on their defence, Alan Hanson would be livid…
Thirty seven countries were represented in 2007 and this looks set to grow for this years competition in China. Regardless of the conceivability of RoboCup’s founding goal, the resulting benefits of the events are undeniable. As Tucker Balch, last years general chair summarised, “One of RoboCup’s great strengths is it’s international flavour. We are able to get people together from many countries and backgrounds to share our research and ideas for making robots more effective.”
So, what are the odds are on the result of the 2051 inter-humanoid world cup being ‘Robo All Stars 3-0 Brazil’…?
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June 13th, 2008
- Running the Silk Road, Exeter Northcott, to Saturday June 14
posted by Phig Billy
Phig Billy here, doctor of gonzo cartooning and self-professed cultural connoisseur. I’m writing to give you all the low down on Running the Silk Road at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, a production by the British East Asian Yellow Earth Theatre company which has been touring the country and is playing at the Northcott for two more nights until Saturday June 14.
Essentially, the play tells two stories, interwoven thematically but presented in stylistically very different ways. The main narrative recounts the efforts of one British Chinese man to prove to his ex-fiancée that he really does value her above his thesis on Chinese mythology. Naturally, he does this by attempting to run the ancient Silk Road trading route to Beijing and raise money for the charity she works for: a charity which is concerned with helping the victims of flooding in China. He is accompanied on his adventure by his two British Muslim friends and his Chinese cousin. The secondary story is related as dreams and hallucinations of the main character and recounts the myths of humanity’s struggle against both the thunder god and then the onslaught of the ten suns.
Running the Silk Road is a curious beast: traditional Oriental spectacle and super-topical, politically-charged meditation, built around a story founded on good old fashioned themes of love, friendship and determination. Does it succeed? Certainly Paul Sirett [writer] and David Tse Ka-Shing [director and art director] cannot be faulted for the scope of their ambition. Depicting scenes in five countries and featuring dialogue in four languages, the play contains quotations from ancient Chinese literature and depicts monsters and characters from Chinese mythology via colourful costumes and puppets, song, dance, acrobatics and kung fu. And if that wasn’t enough, it also encompasses such diverse socio-political issues as [take a deep breath] multiculturalism, nationalism, dictatorship, militarism, civil war, Communism, global warming, international aid, tension between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, homosexuality, women’s rights, the exploitation of developing nations…
The treatment of these issues is essentially non-committal but refreshingly balanced and open. It is good for China, for instance, through the Chinese cousin character, to have the chance to respond to oft-voiced criticisms of its environmental policies. Facts like China’s development of the world’s first fully sustainable cities, or that the pollution per citizen in China is one third the level that it is in Britain, are valid points and seldom publicised in the British press. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel that the drama was occasionally hampered by the sheer weight and frequency of issues raised. The way in which they are continually trowelled on felt heavy-handed and unnecessary to me.
That we feel for the four main characters and their plight in the midst of all this is testament to well written dialogue and superb performances. The actors are all well cast, natural and entirely convincing. I especially enjoyed Chia-Kuei Chen’s performance as the Chinese cousin. Despite the fact that most of his dialogue is in Mandarin, and the audience is therefore obliged to cast their eyes upwards for the subtitles, I found him to be absolutely magnetic, thoroughly endearing and intensely likeable.
In fact, personally speaking, the least successful element of the show was the spectacular Chinese bit, the element which beforehand made me most keen to see it. The mission statement of Yellow Earth Theatre has primarily been to showcase and celebrate traditional East Asian physical theatre, and in this case the model for the treatment of the psychedelic dream sequences is the Beijing Opera. However, elements of traditional Chinese art and drama are everywhere these days, you can even catch wuxia at the multiplex, and perhaps I suffered from having been spoiled by movies and shows like Shaolin: Wheel of Life. There was nothing here that I hadn’t seen before looking much cooler somewhere else. The magnificence of the various puppets similarly underwhelmed me: I suspect that the production lacked the budget to do justice to the director’s vision.
Nonetheless, I must at least entertain the possibility that if you have more of a social life than I do and don’t spend endless hours watching martial arts movies, perhaps you may not even know what wuxia means, then you might be more impressed. Certainly I overheard an elderly couple on my way out praising the grace of the performers. However, the element which I found absolutely whole-heartedly fascinating was the mythological subtext. I am not aware to what extent Sirett changed the stories which he is using or imported them relatively unaltered, nonetheless the relationships between the characters and monsters introduced and the events and themes of the main narrative are challenging and deeply thought-provoking.
In short, my only real criticism is that for hardcore fans of Chinese culture, which the play shall surely attract, it offers nothing which is really new. But I greatly enjoyed watching this play and I left the theatre with lots to think about with all my senses having been stimulated.
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June 13th, 2008
