6 March 2012
From Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 March, Claque ran casting sessions for the Hartfield Community Play, Parallel Lives. Over these four days, some 83 people volunteered to be in the cast with a further 20 to add to the stage management and box office crew.
When people arrived they had measurements for costumes taken, before joining Jon Oram for a group casting session with six other people. Everybody who turned up is now guaranteed a part in the play.
We found a wealth of different talents and ages from people living in Hartfield and the surrounding towns and villages – some familiar faces from previous community plays and many new. The sound of excitement and laughter resounded at every session and there were many comments on the professionalism of the whole process.
The casting sessions were a great success. Thanks to everyone who came. Over the next two weeks, the Claque team will be pulling together a rehearsal schedule and informing everyone of their role. We look forward to working with you from April.
For more photographs and comments, please join the Hartfield Community Play on Facebook or go to www.hartfieldplay.co.uk
(Photographs courtesy of Linda Medhurst)
27 February 2012
This Saturday 25th February, Claque’s volunteer event came to Hartfield, East Sussex. The day saw around thirty people arrive to meet our professional team and get involved in making paper costumes. The event was designed to give everyone the chance to see how they could contribute to the production of Hartfield Community Play and what skills they could bring to the project or learn alongside the team. It also gave the children who came a chance to be creative and crafty by making paper costumes.
Thoughout the event people talked to the team and to other existing volunteers before signing up to roles in stage management, box office, prop and costume-making and set-building. The pigeon puppet (pictured) from the East Grinstead Community Play in 2010 inspired quite a few people. One attendee admitted that she didn’t feel she was particularly creative but was willing to give it a go, which is exactly what the community play is all about.
The event was a great success. Community play supporter and long-standing volunteer Fiona Brown said that there was, “a very buzzy feeling around” which showed as a further 17 people signed up as volunteers and around five more booked in for casting. Of the things volunteers said they were looking forward to about the project many answered “making new friends and learning new skills”.
If you’d like to be involved, please come along to the play reading this Wednesday 29th February from 7.30pm at St Mary’s Church. Hartfield. This is the first time the play, written specifically for and about the village, will be heard publically. Everyone is welcome. Please find more more details and a map to the church here.
For more photographs and news, please join us on Facebook.
06 December 2011
Claque Theatre’s latest production, Hartfield Community Play, has launched a new website.
Created by designer/maker Emily Broad, the site offers a quick and easy online destination to find out what’s going on within the community play programme.
As well as event listings, the site also offers news, tickets and details of how to take part in the making of the play and the lead-in Children’s Book Festival, Storyfest, which is set for May 2012.
Caroline Tully, chairperson of the Hartfield Community Play Steering Group, said, “The success of Hartfield Community Play and Children’s Book Festival is based upon opening up the project to the widest number number of people and being as inclusive as possible. We’re very happy that our new website will help us reach a new audience. The programme is funded by Arts Council England and other local trusts and foundations to encourage community participation. Everyone is welcome to attend any or all of the upcoming events. There is no better time to make new friends, learn new skills and be part of this unique project.
“Hartfieldplay.co.uk offers lots of opportunities to take part and to learn more about the making of a community play” added Liz Carter from Claque Theatre.
“We’re all incredibly happy with the website and very grateful to our volunteers Emily Broad and Penny Lamb for making us something that is beautifully designed and highly functional. We’re going to keep working on it to improve it still further, so there will be even more special features added in the next few months such as booking your place in the free and professionally-run workshops, opportunities for advertising and sponsorship and a blog from a community cast member documenting the progress of the play from an insider’s view,”
If you would like to express your interest in helping with the production of the play or festival from performing to set building and costume design, you can get in touch with the team in the following ways.
Send us a message via the website here.
Join us on Facebook or follow the most up-to-date community play news on Twitter.
11 November 2011
Turn to page 44 in today’s Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead Courier newspapers and you’ll find the Hartfield Community Play vying for your attention.
The project has been shortlisted for a Heart of the Community Award. The award, sponsored by the newspaper and AXA PPP, highlights local causes, celebrates community action and offers projects some financial support in the form of prize money.
Hartfield Community Play is competing for your vote in the Community category with 24 other organisations many well-known of all of them good causes. Out of the shortlisted projects in this category half of them involve theatre, cultural or heritage activities for different age groups and 2 are offering skills training to adults.
“The Hartfield Community Play project is about bringing different groups in Hartfield to work together and consolidating community action into one project”, notes Liz Carter from Claque Theatre. “We are aiming to attract 300 community volunteers of all age groups and backgrounds who will help run many aspects of the play alongside our professionals. We hope the experience and skills they learn will help sustain existing and future initiatives long after the play is over”
The play will be the company’s 33rd production. Previous plays have inspired and equipped people to set-up arts centres, start festivals, build up community choirs, rescue declining areas and even organise themselves to stop unwanted housing developments.
Regular audience member Dawn Waldron comments, “The first time I saw a community play I was completely mesmerised. It’s not like going to the theatre, it’s an adventure. There is a larger than life quality which brings stories vividly alive and pulls you in to the experience. I love the way whole communities are brought together, bonded by their shared experience and sent back out into the world happier and more connected. This is important theatre“
To vote, pick up a copy of the Courier in Tunbridge Wells or East Grinstead between now and 24th November. Fill out the voting slip on page 52 and please send in your vote for us: project number 004.
08 September 2011
Following the success of Claque’s theatre improvisation course, held at Tonbridge School this August, a team of ten Claquers are set to continue working together with Jon Oram as a local performing impro group.
Improvisational theatre takes many forms often comedic but the Claquers preference for storytelling over gags can often result in subtle and poignant drama for their audiences. Their last performance, Riotous Behaviour, received praise for being ‘uplifting’, ‘entertaining’ and ‘a great reflection of their hard work’.
This type of performance isn’t only for actors. Claquers Impro is attracting people with a mix of skills who have a common interest in nurturing quick thinking and creativity. Future plans for the group include preparations for a fully improvised touring producion as well as shorter workshops to help grow audiences and encourage their engagement with improvisation as an art form.
Claquers Impro are now booked to meet every first and third Monday each month starting on Monday 19th September from 7.30pm – 9pm at the Church of Christ, Commercial Road, Tunbridge Wells. If you’d like to join, please e-mail claquers@claquetheatre.com or check our events page for details.
07 July 2011
The Big Lottery Fund has presented Claque with an Awards for All grant in support of a new ‘Communities in Schools’ project. This marks the beginning of Claque’s aim to help develop social and community values through drama. Over the summer, we are training around 8-10 volunteers in educational role-play techniques to take into schools from September 2011.
The first school to have access to this Community Role Play service is St Barnabas Primary School in Tunbridge Wells, where up to ten Claquers will assume roles and become animateurs to tackle with the children such issues as racism, crime and bullying. Claque hopes that this new brand of educational improvisation will help to create discussion about modern stereotypes, opinions and philosophies in a way that children have not previously been able to experience. Drama is not often recognised as an important part of the curriculum but as educational drama has displayed, we believe it deserves much more attention.
The grant will go towards training an band of volunteer Claquers who, with the help of Jon, will supply a new and intuitive way of learning for many children aged 8-11. These volunteers will come from the surrounding communities allowing schools and communities to work more closely together and strengthen their links.
But this is just the start of a much larger project as more and more volunteers are trained from areas previously touched by Claque and their Community Plays. This creates a network of volunteers through Claque with skills in improvised drama which can be implemented as valuable resource in education.
If you are interested in joining the training or nominating your school for this service, please go to http://communityroleplay.eventbrite.com or e-mail info@claquetheatre.com
15 May 2011
This Spring, Claque is inviting people interested in performance, community and theatre to take a more active role with the company via their ‘Claquer’ membership scheme. The scheme opens on Monday 16th May to co-incide with a re-launch of the website.
Based on the 18th century French tradition, the Claquer were an organised body of people who banded together to applaud or deride a performance and thereby attempt to influence the audience, especially during competitions. ‘Applauders’ could be hired, ‘Ticklers’ who made people laugh and ‘Commissaires’ who learned bits of the script. Today, Claque Theatre is a reinvention of this institution.
“Our Claquers are at the heart of our productions and performances.” explains Jon, Claque’s Artistic Director. “They are members of the community who participate in the play either as rehearsed performers or audience members. As a Claquer, you will be invited to add your voice to the making of the play, participate in the research and debate the play’s themes as it is being created.”
The scheme is likely to suit both existing supporters who can afford the subscription and want to help secure the future of community plays as well as anyone wishing to take their interest in theatre a step further. Practitioners are being encouraged to join and use the scheme as a way to meet and collaborate with Claque’s growing number of professional associates.
Members can now sign up monthly via a secure system on the website, deciding their level of involvement and the benefits they wish to receive. These include early-bird play tickets, access to original play scripts and posters and discounts on performance workshops and costume hire.
For more information on becoming a Claquer, e-mail claquers@claquetheatre.com or please visit our Support pages to sign up today.
Alternatively, read more by viewing our Spring/Summer newsletter.
17 March 2011
“When people talk about the Royal Court, in the world of the arts, they don’t just mean a playhouse in London, on the eastern side of Sloan Square. The Royal Court is more than a building. It is an attitude, an inheritance, a global constituency whose members are scattered throughout the performing arts. It is shorthand for the complex calligraphy of 25 years experience in the life of the English Stage Company.” So wrote Richard Finlater on the 25th anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre, which in 2006 celebrated 50 years.
Arnold Wesker (far left) Ann Jellicoe and Keith Johnstone (fourth and third right)
Claque Theatre, formerly Colway Theatre Trust owes its ancestry to the Royal Court and is a significant member of the Court’s global constituency. As the Court celebrated its quarter century on the 2nd April 1981 Ann Jellicoe, former Court founder of Colway, was directing a celebrated community play in Bridport by Howard Barker another court writer of a newer generation. The Poor Man’s Friend was Jellicoe’s third community play. The first, in her home town of Lyme Regis had inspired requests for others in the south west of England and the formation of a company in 1980. Her ideas and principles of what was to become known as the community play were strongly influenced by her experience at the Royal Court and the attitudes and philosophy behind the English Stage Company. Coincidently the genesis of the English Stage Company had been in the south west and Ann Jellicoe was completing a full circle and, in a sense, bringing the Court back home.
The English Stage company originated at the Taw and Torridge Festival in Devon. Playwright Ronald Duncan had launched the festival in 1953 together with friends Benjamin Britten, for whom he’d written librettos, Lord Harwood and a local schoolmaster Edward Blacksell. Among other things they brought down Joan Littlewood’s production of Brecht’s Mother Courage. Managing a festival they soon became acutely aware that commercial managements had little or no chance of recouping production costs in a fortnight’s festival run. The answer, they decided, was to set up a management for the performance of non-commercial plays. At the time the four founders of what they were calling The English Stage Company, was to merely set up productions that would tour arts festivals. However, even with support of the arts council lacked the capital even for this modest ambition. Edward Blacksell then approached his old friend Neville Blond, an extremely wealthy and recently retired businessman who was looking for something to do. Blond had shown no precious interest, never mind knowledge of theatre, but was persuaded by Blacksell’s argument and agreed to come in, but only on the condition that he leased a London theatre for the company; leaving the founding four flabbergasted, he went out and got one.
The English Stage Company, originally conceived to bring new contemporary and challenging non commercial theatre to people in the regions became the most persistently seminal, significantly productive and stubbornly controversial place in British and possibly western theatre. It launched a writer’s movement that was to revolutionise our theatre. First John Osborne, then Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, John Arden and many more. Twenty or so years on Ann Jellicoe was to invite Edward Blacksell to be a founding board member of Colway Theatre Trust and invite writers influenced and nurtured by the court to write for a new genre of theatre. Court writers who have written community plays for Colway and Claque include Arnold Wesker, Howard Barker, Charles Wood and David Cregan.
Now celebrating its 30th anniversary Claque, is working in East Grinstead on a new play Matters of Chance by its present artistic director Jon Oram. The play focuses, as Claque’s community plays traditionally do, on the life and history of the town in which it performs in this case stories of chance set against the background of East Grinstead in the Second World War. In 1943 a cinema was bombed during a matinee by a stray German Dornier bomber, killing 108 people, many of them children. The town was also home of the Queen Victoria Hospital where the experimental and groundbreaking work of plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe was being carried out on pilots burnt in combat. These badly injured men were to form the now famous Guinea Pig Club. Coincidently two significant men, heroes in the town, were to be hugely influential in the hospital, one as an entrepreneur and the second in the rehabilitation of the injured aircrews. If either of these man had not worked so closely together in East Grinstead, not only would the positive future of hundreds of men been secured but the Royal Court and community plays may never have existed. The men’s names were Neville Blond and Edward Blacksell, two of the founders of the English Stage Company.
Neville Blond with John Osborne . Blond supported East Grinstead Hospital and then, encouraged by Edward Blacksell, helped purchase the Royal Court theatre for the English Stage company.