Celebrating the talent and creativity of young people in St
Albans.
Production of ‘Peter Pan’ at Trestle Arts Base Monday 12th
December 6pm and 8pm
On the evening of Monday 12th December Trestle
Arts Base will step back in time as the youth theatre will perform an original
Victorian version of ‘Peter Pan’. The
production includes every member of the youth theatre with nearly 40 young
people aged between 4 and 16 and is a truly magical theatrical production including
a flying Peter Pan, puppets and a moving 13ft pirate ship.
The story is told by J, M and Barrie an eccentric trio who
take us from the Darling’s house, to Neverland, the Lagoon and back again. Trestle
and Tip of the Iceberg are two professional local theatre companies who joined
forces in September to ensure that despite arts cuts they could still offer
affordable professional theatre fun and training for all ages and
abilities.
The youth theatre is going from strength to strength and
this performance shows how the young people, directors, theatre companies and
the Trestle Arts Base are all working together. Lisa Schulberg the youth theatre director said
“We
chose Peter Pan as it’s a story about being young, having fun, and enjoying
imaginary places, which is exactly what the youth theatre is all about. Our production is a large step away from the
Disney story and has been a real challenge for everyone involved, however it’s
been amazing to watch all the age groups working together and finding creative
ways to bring the traditional version to life.”
The groups meet on a Monday evening at the Trestle Arts Base
– TYPTO 4-7yrs 4-5pm TYPT2 8-12yrs 5-6.30pm and TYC 13-18yrs 6.30-9pm and the
Spring term starts on 9th January there are a few spaces available.
There are also a few tickets available left for both
shows.
For information on the Youth Theatre and for Tickets for the
show please contact Tip of the Iceberg on 08454747907 or email admin@tipoftheiceberg.biz
Jim Broadbent with Trestle Artistic Director Emily Gray,
Oliver Jones of Blindeye and Rhian Desborough,
Trestle Marketing Manager at Trestle Arts Base, St Albans
Touring
the UK 21 Sept - 10 Dec 2011
Director Oliver Jones Writer Lizzie Nunnery Designer Anoushka Athique Lighting
Designer Matt Haskins Composer Ben Glasstone Associate
Artist Emily
Gray
This autumn leading theatre company Trestle and the Director of emerging
company Blindeye collaborate on the UK premiere of The Man with the
Luggage written by award winning playwright Lizzie Nunnery. We are
delighted to announce that Trestle’s Patron and Oscar Award Winning Actor Jim Broadbent will feature in The Man with the Luggage, as the voice of
an old, war ravaged Tree.
A note from Jim
Broadbent:
I have supported Trestle as a Patron
for over twenty years and have been delighted by the inventive use of mask,
puppetry and storytelling through the Trestle's Masked years and into the
Unmasked productions. The last show, The Birthday of the Infanta was a
celebration of performance, storytelling and physical theatre; evidence of
the Company’s continuing and considerable prowess as a creative force in UK
theatre.
Trestle led the way as the first UK touring company to build its own home and
the beautiful Trestle Arts Base in St Albans has inspired artists from across
the globe to make new work. The Company has moved with the times and adapted
to circumstance while sustaining a strong commitment to artistic quality,
community development and young people.
However, Trestle's unique creativity and ways of linking touring work with
participation programmes and a community building are threatened by cuts in
government funding. For thirty years Trestle has given the arts community,
young people and audiences across the UK inspiration and learning and now is
the moment for you to give back to Trestle.
Please support Trestle by patronising their new show and donate whatever you
can to help Trestle stay creatively vibrant and effective. Anything our
supporters can give will make a difference to Trestle’s future. About the Show
Inspired by the Eugene Ionesco absurdist play of the same name, The Man
with the Luggage draws on the themes, and atmosphere of the original
piece, but fuses them with contemporary stories of migration and repatriation
to create an invigorating, visually stunning, and often very funny stage
adaptation, set deep within an imagined European state.
The story traces a man’s journey home after becoming a refugee during a war
in his homeland. We follow Damir, as he arrives at a train station and starts
his tortuous, bizarre, and often hilarious journey back home, to his village,
to his house, and to his loved ones. On the way, he is forced to take any
means of transport available, from a bus, to a motorbike and side-car, to a
solitary roller skate!
Through the people he meets along the way, he discovers the true horror of
the last ten years, and the divides that are still apparent between different
people and neighbouring communities.
Make sure you
don’t miss this, compelling, highly charged theatrical spectacular!
The Man with the Luggage tours the UK from 21 September at
Trestle Arts Base in St Albans and finishes at the Marlowe Theatre,
Canterbury on Saturday 10 December 2011.
Suitable for everyone aged 12 and up / Runtime approx 70 mins (no interval)
Please note that this is a Trestle Unmasked production.
Please click here to view photography from
the research and development of The Man with the Luggage (NB:
Cast members have changed) Click here to view Cast and Creative Teams
A man strives to return home, in search of his past, hopeful of his future, and longing for those he left behind. As his journey unfolds, he finds his path repeatedly blocked and his identity endlessly questioned. His luggage and his status are lost as borders are crossed, languages confused, and modes of travel conspire to thwart him. Will he ever reach his destination? ...will his luggage? ...and will his identity arrive with him?
Informed by contemporary stories of migration and repatriation, The Man with the Luggage explores our relationship with home, with nationality, and with authority. It also delves into our dependence on travel and the multitude of obstacles that await us on our journeys through stations, through ports, and through life.
Trestle Unmasked and Blindeye use an agile mix of text, movement, music, and projection, to tell a dashing and deeply moving story where notions of time, space, and memories merge to create a dreamscape of great insight, passion, and humour. It illuminates the struggles that face many of today’s displaced people, and speaks to everyone who has ever been stranded in a foreign land.
After contacting them (thank you Bryony!) we were informed that the image was of dancer and choreographer Mel Simpson (www.melsimpson.com). After tracking down and contacting Mel she informed us that the dancer featured was in fact her ‘doppelganger’ Dani B. Larson, who is also a dancer and choreographer! (http://on.fb.me/jlesTL). Dani kindly has been in touch to let us know that the image in fact came from a dance piece entitled Caught up created by Artistic Director and choreographer Katie Green (www.madebykatiegreen.co.uk) who has agreed to let us use the image –
Thanks to everyone who helped solve The Mystery of the Random Image! Just popping off to the shops to now to purchase a deerstalker and a magnifying glass! "What one man can invent another can discover," wink wink!
There are more than twenty characters in Burn My Heart. So how would you turn it into a stage play for just five actors? This challenge is being undertaken as I write, by Trestle director Oliver Jones with translator and playwright Rina Vergano. While I’ve previously adapted some of my own work (The Other Side of Truth for radio and The Playground for stage – see www.beverleynaidoo.com ), this feels rather like handing over a child for adoption! Yet some paths, I believe, are meant to cross...
A month before Burn My Heart was published in Britain in 2007, Oliver Jones and I spoke for the first time. He told me about his passion to form a company, Blindeye (www.blindeye.org.uk), that would make theatre about human rights. When he spoke of his interest in the Mau Mau, I suggested he read the novel. “I’ve so many images about how I’d stage it!” he said afterward, “but one thing is difficult--the number of characters.” I wondered if he would be deterred.
Yet Oliver's ideas brewed on. Making a play is a collaborative process and quite different from brewing a novel in your head. In addition to the director’s resolve, a lot depends on “things coming together.” Now, three years on, with Oliver now working at Trestle, he has set up Blindeye. I was delighted when he got in touch again. I not only knew of Trestle as one of Britain’s leading touring companies but I’d seen productions on tour and admired the physical storytelling.
In May, when I made my first visit to Trestle’s Art Base in St Albans - during development workshops on Burn My Heart - I wasn’t expecting this hundred-year-old chapel full of gothic shadows and ghosts of a huge Victorian asylum. When I stepped inside the large wooden doors, it felt like the right place to dig into Burn My Heart’s secrets.
It’s now only a few weeks until the play’s autumn première, at Trestle Arts Base, St Albans before its eight-week UK tour. And how are Oliver and Rina tackling the challenge of twenty-plus characters? Well, with a good script, good actors, and imagination you can do almost anything. The list below reveals who will morph into whom, plus some other creative surprises in the casting! Of course specifics can change because that’s the challenge of physical theatre – discovering what works. But women will play the boys and the same actors will play both black and white characters. Am I nervous about seeing the story that still lives in my head take a completely new form on stage? You bet. But what a grand journey for my characters as they stride out beyond the page.
CHARACTERS (5 actors – 3 female, 2 male)
Mugo (Female)
Lance (Female) Mrs Grayson Dreadlock Auntie Gitau
Mathew (Female) Mami Mrs Smithers
Kamau (Male) Old Josiah Insp. Smithers Child at club Waiter at club Schoolboy
Mr Grayson (Male) Longcoat Schoolboy Child at club
At the start of a week of Trestle Summer School, 2nd August 2010, twelve children aged 5 to 10 meet an artistic team of director (Emily Gray), performer (Georgina Roberts) and musician (Philippa Herrick) and take inspiration from Lewis Caroll’s Wonderlands of both Alice and Through the Looking Glass.
A question: can Trestle fully immerse the group in a world in which the artists share theatre techniques and the children make sense of them to create a thoroughly enjoyable week long theatrical experience?
Another question: can Trestle achieve the challenge of researching our next show for this age group without distracting from the major theme and ambition?
Day 1 – We begin with: a theatre building set up to be explored, a group of expectant children, most of whom do not know each other and the dramatic arrival of our performer, falling down the tower of the refurbished chapel, Trestle Arts Base. This character asks ‘Who am I’. ‘Where am I?’ ‘What am I’ and as we move around the building, following the clues and sounds of the White Rabbit, the children embrace the mission to discover who this intruder is by showing us who and what they are.
We end up in the theatre, which has become an installation of Wonderland and the children readily enter the otherness of this world; the contrariness of Wonderland is soon shared between us as each child is measured in vegetables “you are a runner bean”, “you are three beetroot's and a spring onion” and umbrellas become banqueting dishes, apples become powder puffs and recorders become hat stands. The intruder is named Ah-Um by the children and some secretly suspect she might be Alice.
Day 2 - No time to dwell on identity today; time has indeed fled and we are in the kingdom of the Red Queen. The terrifying and absurd monarch arrives and we discover it is her birthday, so games are to be played, rules to be made and unmade, winners and losers to become muddled and heads to be chopped off. The children adapt games to suit the Queen, for example, “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” becomes “How many jam tarts have you Red Queen?” to which she replies, “A crumb, a puff of flour, a smear of jam”. She commands us to learn Spanish rhythms and flamenco poses, so a bull fight can be played out before her. A Jabberwocky made out of a parachute with bins for eyes is made; it dies and there is much galumphing.
Day 3 - The White Queen celebrates her non birthday and we enter her wood, full of tissue paper petals, ethereal sounds and strange creatures. Imaginations run wild as we create hand creatures inspired by Indian mudras (hand gestures) and body monsters made by four hand creatures evolving into a shape made by 4 bodies. Junk puppets are made and brought to life through breath and sound led interactions. Instruments are also given breath and move as if they were creatures, making sounds and conversations. The creative brilliance of the children is evident in their ideas; one suggests an auction in the wood of the White Queen and the group invent objects which were then bid for, not by monetary value, but by crowns, jewels, sneezes and cosmic entities.
Day 4 - With the presence of the White Rabbit comes a chorus of rabbits, caught frozen in the headlights of the imagined Red Queen’s stare. Masks are worn and worked with as the group prepares entertainments for the imminent tea party of the Sad Patter, no, the Glad Matter, no, the Rabbit just can’t get his words out right so nonsense is spoken and understood by all. We borrow ideas for entertainments from Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Birthday of the Infanta, which conjures a world not too far from the strictures and absurdities of the Wonderland gardens and courts.
Day 5 - At last the most frequently requested character of the week arrives, the Mad Hatter himself; he is eccentric and Scottish, unnerving and charismatic. He helps the children to create the experience that they want their parents to have in the afternoon; he is demanding and kind and then he falls asleep, leaving them to set up for their performance.
There is no script and there is no rehearsal. The week’s work has been grounded in Trestle’s approach to physical theatre, creative learning and storytelling. We invited the children in as individuals and demanded from them the depth of creativity and bravery we would expect from an adult professional. If we as professional artists have engaged and guided the young people in skilled way, then this culmination of the process will genuinely show the audience what the week has been like and draw them too into experiencing Trestle’s work.
The Sharing In come parents, grandparents, carers and aunties for an hour of the utterly unexpected; experiential live art meets physical theatre performance in an installation setting. Trestle have lost the children in Wonderland and the audience have to coax them to appear – in dappled light, poems of defeating great beasts are told, the children lecture their parents on the exotic puppet creatures of the White Queen’s wood, the adults dance to the demands of the Red Queen and suffer elimination, the Mad Hatter invites us all to a virtual tea party. Only once the entertainments have entertained, culminating in the futterwaken fashion show, can the real tea, cake and jam tarts arrive and be shared by all. Parents comment on their children coming home each day with questions the adults cannot answer, the performance opens some parents’ eyes to new types of theatre; the children also appear to have grown each day. There has been great enjoyment and in terms of creative learning many valuable life skills have been developed, we hope with a lasing effect. The performer has delivered brilliant performances in role, becoming a different character each day, all of which the group has engaged and improvised with. The musician has used exemplary facilitation skills; encouraging instrument playing and rhythmic performance which are story based and musically open. As director, I have shared the physical theatre skills that Trestle uses and supported the children in their play with them.
Responses from parents about their children: He showed increasing enthusiasm as the week went on. He was desperate to come from about 8am every day. Absolutely loved it and had lots of fun. So lovely to see them looking so comfortable in the space
From a practitioner:
What the children brought to it was genuinely integrated into the work; it was far more than a workshop!
I started working for Trestle as Marketing Manager just before Christmas, and in these few short months I have already been bombarded by giraffes, fairies and arctic weather conditions, seen two key members of the team off and away on maternity leave and their wonderful replacements hit the ground running straight into 2010 and the spring season. I can’t help feeling that this is the beginning of a new phase for us here at Trestle.The Glass Mountain marked the end of our three international collaborations and our current production Moon Fool; ill met by moonlight heralds the beginning of a series of co-productions with emerging companies.
My journey to Trestle began bizarrely, a long time ago when I was studying at what was then Melton Mowbray Performing Arts College. I was fortunate to be taught my acting lessons by, among others, one Sally Cook – now Melton was a serious Performing Arts College, it was a place that at the time was a little controversial – I studied a Btec course which was still considered a sure fire way of not being able to get into University (a point I later proved wrong). Sally, unbeknown to me, had been a founding member of a theatre company that was known as....Trestle. Well, I took her mask and physical theatre module and it has formed a major part of my practice and my life ever since.
Melton and Sally lead me to Dartington College of Arts, a place which at this very moment is disintegrating in the same way as (children of the 80s, please stand up) Never Ending Story’s Fantasia. The tiny grains of sand that remain have settled in Falmouth – hopefully into a place where people are still allowed to dream of things that amount to more than money. The course at Melton was created by two ex Dartington students who experienced the place at its time of true shining during the 1960s and the reality of their vision helped form my view of live arts.
Dartington is not a place to be mentioned lightly, especially at this time of mourning and rebirth; I refuse to admit that the heart of the place will die, but I can't convey how much I hope the essence of why we all went there remains in spirit. My college, our college, our community, spans and crosses graduation dates and years of study and exploration- Foxhole and Higher Close, of reminiscing via Google maps and hitching up the hill, (well remembering when hitching was just something you did), of all the things you should have figured out when you were there before life came stampeding towards you and put it into context... finally, the lectures slept through, but the twelve hour durational performance that was the reason you slept in, of yoga in the gardens and gin outside the SU. Any time spent in the company of such an auspicious place (and I do think that Dartington is that), is a privilege and it stays with you throughout the rest of your life.
After Dartington the world seemed vast and tiny simultaneously and like any contemporary arts graduate I stumbled through individual projects, taught, worked and wondered. Within a few years I was fortunate enough to find steady employment in a Theatre as a Marketing and Press Officer. The Alban Arena in St Albans is hailed as Hertfordshire’s premier entertainment venue and hosts everything from Jools Holland to the Tweenies (not quite where I saw myself when I was at University), but for two and a half years I was nurtured and allowed to focus my skills and began to understand the engineering of commercial theatre. Without this experience, I could not have made the journey back to the Theatre in my heart.
I am feeling now as if my feet are under the desk and all the elements that are encompassed within Trestle are coming more into focus every day. I am facing a period of great learning and improvisation at time when it seems harder than ever to produce work that invokes feeling and reaction;Moon Fool; ill met by moonlight is out on the road and has been met by some rave reviews reflecting both the passion and drive behind the shows conception and the power and love of all of those involved.
Work has already begun on our next co-production with new company Blindeye. Burn My Heart is based on the novel by award-winning writer Beverley Naidoo. The show will use African and European music and movement styles through a powerful mix of text, compelling storytelling and physical theatre to tell this fast-paced, devastating and highly relevant story. Blindeye’s Director Oliver Jones will be visiting Kenya, where the novel is set, to collaborate with artists during April.
Blindeye is an exciting new theatre company, dedicated to the production of and participation in work on national and international human rights issues. Both Trestle and Blindeye share a passion for collaboration with artists from an early stage in the process; Blindeye experiment with traditional tools of theatre-making to create work that is visceral, provocative and relevant to the world we live in today.
I feel now as if I am in the right place, as Marketing Manager for Trestle and as an individual. I am certain that whatever is thrown at us as a Company we can face head on and overcome.
Trestle has been making innovative and inspirational physical storytelling theatre since 1981. Originally known for their work with masks, Trestle Unmasked collaborates with UK and international artists to unify movement, music and text into a compelling theatrical experience. Our productions tour nationally engaging a diverse range of audiences and reach out to as many people as possible with an unrivalled participatory programme. Visit our website at www.trestle.org.uk
