Tabla de contenidos para January 2022 en Ink Pellet

The cast includes 150 students, studying on Chickenshed’s inclusive Further and Higher Education courses. Paul Morrall, Chickenshed’s Director of Education Training and Outreach, explains: “By inclusive we mean that education and performing arts, studied and accredited at our theatre, is open to the widest possible range of Lived Experience and underrepresentation backgrounds. This production is geared towards empowering our students to challenge the misconceptions of what exploitation, radicalisation, brainwashing and mind manipulation actually are.” Paul passionately believes that young people are best placed to understand how and why people want to control, manipulate and eventually exploit them and others. However, young people are often either patronised for their perceived susceptibility to exploitation or seen as being passive receptors who are then groomed to become exploitation agents themselves. Bethany Hamlin and…

As is traditional now for me in Ink Pellet, wishing you new year’s greetings for 2022, it gives me great pleasure to bring you the best of the year ahead in art. It’s another bumper year, back to the good old days it seems, pre-Covid, of BIG shows up and down the country to visit with students and colleagues. My round up offers you a dozen of the brightest exhibitions, with a range of media, though I’m aware that I favour painting somewhat. I’ve found myself working in sketchbooks again over the last month so perhaps it reflects my desire (and need?) to get back to the basics of mark-making, even though I’ve been a photographer teacher by trade for some years now. That’s not a bad thing though –…

A surreal play, dating from 1974, Habeas Corpus is farce without the clutter. Director Patrick Marber and his team know how to make vintage Bennett sing. The piece makes no attempt at realism. The set consists of a coffin, identities are continually mistaken, characters burst into song and often deliver soliloquies in rhyming couplets. Twice we get manic tango to the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem. There’s a running gag about size (Dan Starkey as Sir Percy Shorter and that’s what he is) borrowed from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a great deal of misunderstanding about a pair of false breasts. We’re in the home of an unlikely doctor in Hove where almost everyone is randily yearning for sex with someone inappropriate. There’s something appealingly innocent about this at a…

It’s always a pleasure to visit Sylvia Young Theatre School. Its astonishingly attractive building is a light, bright, lofty former church just off Edgware Road. Complete with stained glass, pillars and grandiloquent staircases, it has been converted to include two vocational floors (studios, rehearsal rooms, recording studio), two academic floors and a large canteen with two courtyard gardens. On the top is a penthouse home for the eponymous Sylvia Young and her husband, Norman. At 83, she still comes downstairs to work every day and is every inch a hands-on principal. Founded in Drury Lane by Sylvia Young in 1981, today the school provides a rounded full-time education for around 220 (capacity for 250) 10–16-year-olds. Frances Chave is the headteacher and she leads a strong team of teachers of academic…

I live in the London Borough of Lewisham. It is, I learned recently, London’s most diverse borough. And that is one of the many things I love about it. When, five years ago, I moved back to my native borough after many decades of living in Kent, the diversity was one of the attractions. In my suburban street of fifty or so semi-detached houses we have people whose forebears came from all over the world and every continent. And many families living near me are glorious, harmonious intermarried melanges. I was, therefore, delighted when Lewisham was awarded London Borough of Culture status for 2022 and raced off gleefully to Rivoli Ballroom at Crofton Park (one of the borough’s real architectural gems) for the launch one morning in November. In a…

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They are rehearsing in an additional understudy. And I sit at the back of the empty stalls and watch the meticulous work until there’s a short “tea break” and Isobel is free to come and chat to me. Her co-director, Simon Harvey, hospitably pops off to find us both some tea. I ask her first about the new understudy I’ve been watching. “Yes, we’ve always worked with two but under present circumstances we need a third for safety and she’s great – only 22 and straight out of drama school but fearlessly willing to immerse herself. Actually, so far, we have done a hundred shows here and lost only one – because a cast member had a bad reaction to the booster. But we need as much safety net as…

by Traci N. Todd Published by Scribble Nina Simone was born in North Carolina and showed musical promise from babyhood, encouraged by both parents although her preacher mother did not approve of secular music. This account – which is evocatively illustrated by Christian Robinson – traces her life through classical piano lessons and the Juilliard and constant segregational oppression which eventually developed her into a raw, angry, singer of inspirational protest songs. The account of her parents being removed from the front row, so that a white couple could sit down at one of Nina’s concerts, is chilling. The prose is warmly poetic: “a voice that was rich, sweet and like soft thunder” and “the steady roar of unrest”, the book is also very informative, although the story omits things…

It’s often forgotten that the British Library is a repository of manuscripts not just books and this enlightening exhibition (postponed from 2020 which was the 250th anniversary of his birth) shows what a surprisingly wide range of Beethoven texts are held there. The famous 9th symphony, for example, was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of London in 1824 for £50. He reneged on the contract by allowing the first performance in Vienna in 1824. It was performed in London in 1825 before being published in Germany in 1826. It’s oddly moving to see the manuscript. Of course, the 9th had, and has, a colourful and sometimes political afterlife. That too is alluded to here. I loved the notebook which he carried when walking so that he could jot down ideas.…

How did you get into drama? When I was about seven, I took part in several week-long drama parties. A bit like summer school but our parents organised it and brought in directors. It was basically dressing up and having fun! What about school? I went to a state primary school in West London, where I grew up and then to Latymer School. There was a great deal of drama there, but it all seemed a bit cliquey, and I didn’t get involved much although I did do some interactive theatre at festivals where I could develop freedom around performing. And thence to Cambridge to read English? Yes. And that was where I really started to do a lot of drama. The first show I did was directed by a…