Working with young people.. The great, the challenging and the surprising.

So, I had a dream that I wrote a blog that listed all the great things and the not so great things about deciding to create a theatre company for young people. Therefore... I decided to make this dream a reality; because how often do we get to do that?!
First let me say, before I get a backlash of people complaining that I am stereotyping young people, my intention with this blog is to share my experiences.

I have always enjoyed working with young people. I used to attend a youth club and summer activity club and as soon as I turned 16 I became a leader of both. If you look through my CV I would say 90% of jobs have been working with children and young people. I should say that I count young people to mean anyone aged 16-25. It wasn't until I started to lead young people with my own company that I realised I still had a lot of lessons to learn. Below are my top Five things I didn't realise or had to learn to about working with young people.

1) Know that you are in charge.  Being only 24 myself, and 21 when I started the theatre company (the first show was the day after my 22nd birthday) I found it difficult to assert dominance through the first show. I do not have a lot of confidence in myself and I kept second guessing and worrying that the cast members didn't like me. I would go to rehearsal with cakes in the hope to gain favour and I would leave every rehearsal panicking that I wasn't doing a good enough job. When I posted news about the second show auditions and all except a couple of the cast came along and brought friends along with them I knew that I must have done something right. I left all my self doubt behind at this point and concentrated on being a good director. As the director the cast are not your friends they cannot be bought with cake and they most certainly will not respect you when you need to be hard on them if you don't assert your authority.


2) Don't treat them like kids. I have always maintained that the young people within any cast should take ownership of their performance and understand their position and value within the team. This does not mean that every young person that comes wants to take the show seriously. At every audition and at the start of the first rehearsal. I introduce myself and give a brief history of the theatre company (because let's be honest the history is very brief). I then give them a talk about why Oddbox Theatre is different: I explain that I work with young people but that in no way means that this is a youth theatre. It is a theatre company for young adults to work on different types of theatre. When you stand on stage I don't want the fact that you're "young" to be an excuse for poor theatre. We are a team and if one person doesn't treat the project with professionalism then the rest of the team will suffer. I have been so impressed with so many of the young people that have been involved in Oddbox and how, when given the opportunity, they respond so positively from being treated like adults rather than school children. One actor invited me to his college production a few months ago and when I spoke to his teacher she expressed that he acted up in class and to be honest seemed to be just another teenage boy in her class. This young man has been involved in a number of our shows and pushes himself to be the best he can. Yes, he's slow at learning lines, but he asks for help and the other young professionals help and support him. Giving these teenagers the chance to be treated like adults is something I will always do.
However, this does lead onto point three...

3) Not everyone that walks through the door wants to be treated like an adult. It makes me so sad when a real talent walks through the door and they let the group down. Maybe sometimes I forget that they are teenagers and this is something I have had to learn. With any show be it adults or young people there is always the risk that, between audition and performance, an actor could suffer from illness or some other ailment which prevents them from performing. However, the age of our actors does mean that they may not understand the true commitement they've made by joining the cast or the correct way to resign and that burying your head in the sand does not mean things blow over. Throughout the last couple of years there are members of the group I have had to stop inviting young people to auditions because they have let us down at the last minute on more than one occasion.

4) Be prepared to repeat information... a lot.. if there's one frustration about working with young people that I didn't predict it's their inability to found out information for themselves. I can send weekly emails and put information on the Facebook group, which I make for every production, and guarantee I will still receive a text asking me to relay information. Even saying "Please reply to this email", well, I was silly to even assume that might work. I used to get frustrated about it all because, well, it is REALLY annoying having to email, facebook and text the same information, but I think I've come to realise that with exams, college, part time jobs and family commitments these teenagers will always be asking. Also, the asking means they're committed and excited and that's all I can ask.

5) Embrace every second - You're guaranteed to meet and influence some stars. I love working with young people, because the determination to be somebody is a wonderful thing you rarely find outside of the 16-25 year age group. Their enthusiasm to be treated like an adult, to mature and show what they're made of is what I've found of most of those who have walked through the door. Some who are lucky enough, and brave enough, to know that they want to go onto professionally perform have done so and I am so proud that OddBox theatre has been a part of their progression. Understanding the reason that the individual has walked through the door to the audition or workshop is your job to identify and then tailoring their experience to ensure that they gain everything they can is a responsibility that is entirely yours.

So there you have it - the top Five things I learnt about working with young people in my theatre company.

Advertising away!

So, advertising on a budget is something I have come to learn and attempt to master over the last couple of years. With each show I have had a smidge more money to put towards advertising for shows, but that by no means means that I have been able to out posters on the sides of buses!
So, how does one advertise on a budget AND ensure to gain as many ticket sales as possible?

Social Media- Do not over estimate the power of the "Facebook event". As great as it is as a way to launch the event, unless they're your friends, family or people who "like" your page it is unlikely that complete strangers will discover your event and more about your business. Unless you pay for it. Many a time I have been looking at all the profile pictures of those claiming to be attending an event and when the time arises a few of the usuals step through the door making my heart sink at the effort put into what I had believed to be tried and tested methods of advertising.
I have paid for help advertising on Facebook and I must admit for the 1000's of people they claim to be able to share the event with it is surprisingly reasonably priced. Even if these people don't decide to attend the event that I'm advertising I am content with the fact that these people know what OddBox is and what we do. You can choose the demographic and the interestes of your ideal audience to ensure that my advert for youth theatre production auditions isn't wasted on old aged chess players in Greece.

Flyers- Although the printing of the flyers is not free it is a reasonable price to think that if you're selling tickets for £5 each and it cost £5 for 500 flyers and on average 1 in 30 people that see your advert will take interest... well I'm rubbish at Maths, but even I know that it's worth it. It's also worth taking the time to make the flyer look and feel professional. So, now it's about thinking about the best places for the flyers to go and ensuring that you keep track of which places have the best uptake. I would say though the best thing to do is to go out, speak to people and place the flyer in their hands. Talk to them about the product and who your passion for what it is you're selling.

Free advertising online- There are many local emails with website where you can place adverts for events and products Although the free things get very little coverage you'll be surprised how doing lots of little things will allow coverage of the internet. With a couple of previous shows I have put on every single website I could think of that allowed advertising for free and friends have been sent emails and received links which have included said advert. Like I said previously, when you're at small business (I mean like just you in your pyjamas on your laptop watching TV small) even the smallest amount of people seeing your advert is a big thing.

So, there's a bit of a snippet of how I intend on advertising our latest show. Hope this helps anyone, like me sat in the sofa in their pyjamas running a business, needing to get the name out there.

Rehearsal number two...

So on the 31st of January we are performing a production of Chekhov's short comedy play, "The Bear" three times in one day.
I really want to focus upon the development of the characters and ensuring that their emotions and relationships are delivered in a convincing and naturalistic way. Making comedy seem natural is a difficult skill to establish and so from the beginning of the rehearsal process this has been the main focus.
When we talk about "naturalism" there really is only one practitioner that I can refer to and that is Stanislavski. A neighbour of mine gave me a copy of his book "An Actor Prepares" and it has become a bit of a bible whenever I need help creating activities and workshops centered around naturalism.
One particular chapter that I have focused on this week is about "Emotion memory": the use of life experiences to influence how we interpret our characters and deliver out lines.
It's quite difficult for some actors to sit back and review "how" they are acting and I really am planning on challenging the actors to do just this. Stanislavski suggested that, "What was going on inside of you was of much greater interest" than how you physically act on stage. Of this I am a total believer and it is this idea that will be our main focus.
At the next rehearsal I will run a couple of activities based on the work Stanislavski did on emotion memory. I will ask each of the actors to look at their scripts and when we run through a scene they must state which emotion their character is experiencing with each line being spoken. Some lines may have more than one emotion so I would ask that they stop their lines to give us a new adjective at the right moment. Afterwards we will discuss why they are experiencing these emotions and see if any of them felt they had to change their initial thoughts due to a reaction to another line of action on stage.
Another exercise I will deliver is to help get the actor in touch with the senses felt by the character. Stannislavski suggested that "Sensation memory and Emotion memory run parallel to one another". We all use our eyes and ears as our main senses when acting. We listen for our cues and work on our eye contact with the audience and other actors on stage to convey the emotion of the piece. However, I would like to help the actors to work with their other three senses.
Once all five senses are engaged and all emotions are understood the end result should be a wonderfully acted piece of theatre which totally engages the audience and that the actors deliver more than, as Stannislavski suggests, "Repeated a successful rehearsal instead of recreating a new living scene".

There are so many ways to engage your own experiences and knowledge of emotions and senses in order to create a successfully naturalistic performance and in the next blog I'll be talking more about how to gain on stage relationships.

If you've got all the way to the end of this I hope that it has been a bit helpful and insightful into the world of naturalism.

Who is the director...

Hi, so the smiley red head above is me. My name is Jamie Ann I'm a 24 year old English and Theatre Studies graduate who, like most, bumbles through life trying to make it exactly how I want it to be. I work in a big ol' department store because I have rent to pay and live with my boyfriend and our two goldfish.

I graduated in 2011 which was a weird moment that I never quite understood. Real life is something that no amount of sitting in a library can prefer you for; who knew!? Anyway, In 2011 I decided that I didn't want to be a drama teacher and that I would start my own theatre company. I came up with the name "OddBox" and got a friend to make a logo (as seen in my selfie above) and started planning how I was going to make the "next big thing". The first productions came about in 2012 and "OddBox Theatre Company" has been producing shows around Hampshire and the Isle of Wight ever since. 

However, I'll admit until about 9 months ago, I didn't really know what running a theatre company meant. There's a difference between directing and producing a show, and running and taking ownership of a theatre company; that you and the people who get involved in, can be proud of. 

So, to help me focus and give you and insight into what I'm learning it takes, I thought I'd start this blog. Hey, we might learn something together. 

I go to see shows, meetings, networking events, costume and prop shopping and hey ever now and then I might run a rehearsal!

Right, it's definitely bed time for me. because tomorrow is a blinkin' busy day!

Very excited to share my experiences with you all!

Speak soon,

Jamie Ann

If you read through this and want to find out a bit more about us we're on Twitter and Facebook just search @OddBoxTheatre or facebook.co.uk/oddboxtheatre