Out of the Dark

During the month of August, the Almeida Theatre closes to the public “going dark”.  Many people think that means we stop work but in fact this month is a very important time for the company to prepare for the forthcoming season.

In the rehearsal room, our Artistic Director started work with the cast, creative team and administrative team on the first production of the 2007-8 season, Awake and Sing! which opened in September.

At the theatre, our Head of Production and his team carried out maintenance to all our technical equipment; hundreds of lanterns and miles of electrical cable were all checked and repaired as necessary.

The Theatre Manager was overseeing maintenance works to the Front of House, the Auditorium, Dressing Room and Green Room and assembling her new team for the autumn.

The Out of the Dark #3 Project

Almeida Projects used this time for creative research and development. Working with local young people and professional artists, we experimented with processes and ideas drawn from the plays in the 2007-8 season. For one week, the theatre space was given over to the Out of the Dark company so that young theatre-makers could directly contribute to our planning by workshopping ideas with us and giving us their personal response to them.

This year Out of the Dark #3 worked with two groups of young people.

In the mornings, we entered the world of Marianne, a ten year old girl whose pencil drawings come alive in her dreams. Children aged 9 – 12 collaborated with young people aged 15- 19 investigating the imagination, dreams and growing up, using games, story-telling and movement.

In the afternoons, the 15-19 year olds helped us to revisit Caryl Churchill’s landmark play Cloud 9. Using exercises based on the workshop methods used by the play’s original creators- Churchill and Max Stafford-Clark - in 1979, we investigated what the play’s themes - gender, sexuality, patriotism, empire, war and happiness -might mean to local teenagers in 2007.

The afternoon sessions involved improvisation, story-telling, lyric writing and movement.

The results of the Out of the Dark #3 helped to inform the Projects work for Autumn/Winter 2007-8 and beyond. The process was led by Director of Almeida Projects, Rebecca Manson Jones and actor Andrew Pembrooke.