The Stage: Popular prop gun made illegal

I've just seen this in the Theatre Bristol newsletter and thought it was worth a repost:

Read This and Avoid Going to Prison for 5 Years
If you, your company (or anyone else you know) ever has cause to work with blank firing prop guns, you will want to read this especially as firearms offences tend to carry mandatory minimum prison sentences. A type of revolver that fires blanks and which has been used widely by theatres and film production companies has been made illegal.

Summer Saturday

The first workshop in the Bradon Forest School Summer Saturday series was a great success! The school's art department, who have been running popular ceramics evening classes for two years, have branched out to offer a variety of art sessions to the community.

Saturday saw all the windows blacked out for the Life Drawing class. Ros, one of the attendees, said: "Everything about the class was great. The model was very relaxed and professional, the facilities were superb and we had expect tuition. A brilliant day!"

Sally Cooke, the school's art technician, is our community ceramics teacher. The evening courses have proved so popular that she has answered demand by running beginners as well as intermediate classes.

"We have such great facilities here that I thought it would be a great idea to open them up to the public. The 'Summer Saturday' series seemed a great way to offer the local community taster sessions in different art forms, and so far the response has been really positive!"

The workshops run from 10am to 4pm with refreshments and as we only want to make sure we cover costs, they are great value! The next class is Saturday 12 June where you can learn to create your own medieval letters and then we have Oil Painting for Beginners on Saturday 26 June. Both these classes cost only £25 with a £5 material charge to be paid to the tutor on the day.

The final workshop is Clay Sculpted Heads with Ron Holmes on Saturday 10th July and is only £25, covering all materials. We also have our matinee performance of the summer musical Sweet Charity on this day, starting at 12pm, followed by our second annual Twenty20 cricket match between school staff and Purton village at 2pm. The PTA will be providing their delicious BBQ and cream teas... what a great way to spend a summer afternoon!

If you are interested in booking yourself on any of the Summer Saturday workshops, or would like to find out more about Sweet Charity and the cricket, please contact me on 01793 773981. Full details can be found on the website.

Review: Seven Deadly Sins & Flautino's Revenge

This week saw the final product of many, many, many weeks hard work by two different casts of the Key Stage 3 Drama Club. 

Claire Parsloe and Ashley Larkin directed 6 small sub-casts in The Seven Deadly Sins. The students came up with their own ideas based on their allocated sin and worked alongside staff to devise the interlocking performance. The climatic finale saw each previous sinner face their god in the showdown of wrath. The students all performed superbly, with intensity and emotion that surpassed their age and experience, especially those still in Year 7! Well done to all involved.

Our young commedia troupe - possibly the youngest in the country! - performed their energetic and vivacious devised piece, Flautino's Revenge. The group started the devising process with a workshop ran by lead practitioner Michael Chase, from Glasshouse Masks. This brand new lazze told the comedic tale of school management with an insight into school inspectors!

The commedia piece was a light hearted way to end an enjoyable evening of exciting new young theatre.

Opening this week...

The final rehearsals are going on as we speak and our next show in the theatre is looking pretty slick! The Key Stage 3 Drama Club have been busy devising their own version of the Seven Deadly Sins and the seven tales will all link together throughout the first performance.

Our young commedia troupe will finish the evening with a bit of light hearted entertainment in Flautino's Revenge. The cast previously worked with Michael Chase of Glasshouse Masks to start the piece off, but have been tirelessly directing themselves to get the play ready for public performance.

With two brand new pieces of theatre by our talented youngsters, it'll be worth making the effort this week!

Wednesday 12th and Thursday 13th May
7.30pm
Tickets: £4 adults, £3 students

Envy

Tenderoni

If you're a fan of Bloc Party, or to be honest even if you're not, make sure you check out their singer Kele's first solo track. I heard it on Jo Wiley over the weekend and it's amazing! Love it, love it. Can't stop listening. Go Kele!

Poster Design

Before Easter I led a session with a group of BTEC Music students on creating publicity for a music event. They had a good time playing around with different themes and ideas and created a poster for any type of event during the session - including drafting an example of how not to design publicity! They were then set the task of producing an appropriate style poster for a future planned BTEC music event. I really like this one that's come through from Jess. Am I a little biased because she's used one of my photos? In all seriousness though, it's relevant, the use of black space and text is well applied, the font is appropriate for the audience, the image sets the scene and she's included all the right info. What do you think?