We’ve had another busy week at Stagedoor Learning. Our main focus for the week was the devised performances students have created for Unit 3 of their BTEC, which is the Group Performance Workshop unit. Students have had to devise an original piece based on a Salvador Dali painting, and have created clever, sophisticated performances which really show off their skills. Alongside that, they’ve had to write a number of milestone logs outlining the creative process. It’s been an intense project, and it will conclude this coming week with performances at our partner school on Wednesday afternoon.

Of course, the fact that we’re involved in intensive preparation for an examined unit doesn’t mean that we haven’t done anything else this week – far from it! On Tuesday morning we had our normal singing session with Ria Keen, focusing on songs which link to the works of Shakespeare. This week we looked at the Tonight Quintet from West Side Story and This Can’t Be Love from The Boys from Syracuse. We’re building up to a performance in the Everyman Studio at the beginning of July – look out for more information soon. We had a singing experience of a very different kind on Friday afternoon, as we took part in a workshop with members of the English Touring Opera, who were performing at the Everyman all week. This workshop focused on the work of Gilbert & Sullivan and was an interesting experience – especially for those who had never come across G&S before!

We finished the week with a performance on the main stage of the Everyman, which was quite an experience! Having sung for the Everyman Theatre Association at their Christmas Meal, we were delighted to be invited back to perform at their AGM. The AGM concludes with a lunch served to ETA members on stage in the Everyman’s main auditorium, and so it was particularly exciting to be performing for them, though it was a little odd to be standing on the main stage singing in the wrong direction – our audience were on the stage, rather than in the auditorium! The performance went very well and we received lovely feedback from ETA members.