In this blog we hear from Gill Simmons, Co-Artistic Director of Brave Bold Drama, an award-winning theatre and community arts company run by two full-time freelance artists who are committed to improving access and representation for working class people in the arts. They have been a Trinity Champion Centre every year since 2021. This blog post is about young people from one of the most socio-economically deprived wards in the UK gaining Arts Award Explore by participating in a youth theatre project that saw them perform on the main stage at the Bristol Old Vic.
When the Bristol Old Vic invited Brave Bold Drama to run a youth theatre project at a secondary school in Hartcliffe, south Bristol, and to bring the young people to perform on the main stage, we immediately knew we would need to embed Arts Award within this project in order to gain the full support of the young people’s families. The young people themselves took no convincing and were raring to go!
Through a brief note sent from us via the school to the young people’s families, we explained how gaining an Arts Award qualification would give the young people a tangible advantage when accessing further education, training or employment, as it would enable them to demonstrate numerous desirable cross-transferable soft skills such as teamwork, confident communication and problem-solving.
So there we were, all set up, visiting the school in Hartcliffe every Thursday afternoon from January to April 2024, devising a show for performance at the Bristol Old Vic in order for 24 young people to work towards their Arts Award Explore.
We were part of a much larger city-wide youth theatre project by the Bristol Old Vic called Young Company City. All participating youth groups watched a performance of Starter for Ten! , a new musical set in the 1980s and based on the TV show University Challenge, at the Bristol Old Vic, and then devised their show in response to that production.
We interpreted this brief by thinking about another 1980s TV show, Are You Being Served? (primarily because we loved the theme tune!) and also by thinking about the core message of Starter for Ten! which is about a working-class young man feeling out of place when he goes to university. The result was Supermarket! a show inspired by weird things being out of place in supermarkets.
All the young people could readily give examples of having seen prawns dumped onto pringles and soup cans next to the socks at supermarkets, so we knew we were building this show on solid ground, and each week we led them through a wide range of devising exercises in order to create what ended up being an extremely unique and engaging show that was advertised via the following blurb:
‘Take a brave step through the sliding doors of a supermarket where anything could happen. Talking fridges, outraged bleach bottles and sniping fashion mannequins popular the shop floor, while the supermarket manager is unhealthily preoccupied with extraterrestrial conspiracy theories.
Oh yeah, and a bunch of big cats are planning a heist in the loading bay.
Devised by students from Bridge Learning Campus, Hartcliffe, working in collaboration with Brave Bold Drama, Supermarket! Is a celebration of the surreal and shines a proud light on the imaginative powers of the working class.’
So how did we fulfill the criteria of Arts Award Explore?
The weekly rehearsals over a four-month period were more than enough to demonstrate the young people had taken part in a range of arts activities (Part A). And of course, they created a piece of art (Part C) because a full house watched them perform a show of their own creation at the Bristol Old Vic in April 2024.
We made time for the young people to take rehearsal notes and sketches to help them capture their ideas during the devising process, and we took photos and footage of key stages (Part C). Both of these elements helped the young people remember what they had already created, which was especially useful when we didn’t see them for a while due to school holidays.
The photos, footage, notes and sketches also came in extremely useful once we had performed the show. If anyone is thinking of running any kind of Arts Award project that has a performance element, we strongly advise that you don’t make the performance the last thing young people do, as the period of time after the performance is very important. Only once they have presented the work are the young performers able to fully reflect and take stock of what they have made and how far they have come (Part D).
We booked out the school computer rooms for several sessions for Part D, after the young people had performed, so they could look back on their creative process and articulate a personal response about what had inspired them during the project. They mostly typed this, or made PowerPoints, and some preferred to talk and have a supporting adult type their words.
Sessions in the computer room meant the young people could also complete the research element of the course with relative ease (Part B). Although we had been researching throughout the devising process, as the rehearsal room had no devices or Wi-Fi, it was hard to evidence this for the purposes of Arts Award. It wasn’t appropriate to set the young people research tasks to complete and bring in for next week, as some were in Year 10 and extremely busy with GCSE coursework, while others were Year 7s still learning to cope with the challenges of secondary school. So we chose to complete the research element after the performance, in a computer room.
We gave the young people a range of research topics to choose from, because choice gives young people a sense of autonomy. Some opted to research into the creative team who had created the Starter for Ten! musical. Some preferred to research into the 1980s musicians who had inspired the soundtrack for the musical such as George Michael or Madonna, and some chose to research into the theatre-making principles of Brave Bold Drama. All these topics were, of course, directly relevant to the piece of theatre they had made for their Arts Award project, so the young people could see the point of this research. Also, by this point, they were extremely proud of what they had achieved on stage and were all very motivated to complete the research in order to gain their certificate.
Finally, also in the computer room, we asked the young people to write or say what they had enjoyed and achieved through completing Arts Award Explore (Part D: Share). We made a short film featuring photographs of Supermarket! in performance combined with these quotations, which we shared on Brave Bold Drama’s social media (see it here). It was also shown at the school during an assembly in order to celebrate the young people’s achievements.
This was a lovely and administratively simple way to fulfill the final element of the Explore project. The fact that the performance at the Bristol Old Vic was attended by so many of the young people’s family and friends of course was also a sharing of what they enjoyed and had achieved, but again, that’s not so easy to evidence, which is why we also made the film.
Will any of the young people who were in Supermarket! find themselves working professionally in theatre in years to come? We would hope some might manage it. But we also know those beautiful certificates they were awarded for making the show will build their self-esteem and bravery, whatever future career path they may find themselves on.
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