Productions


Manor College welcomes the Young Americans

24th - 26th February 2011

From February 24th - 26th 2011 Manor College welcomed forty five performing artists from the Young Americans programme. 90 students from schools from all over Hartlepool were excited to take part in three days of workshops culminating in a performance on Saturday evening in the Sports Hall.

The Americans arrived on the Wednesday evening after a day of events which included their coach breaking down and having to hire another coach to get to Hartlepool. They met their host families and all went their separate ways for the evening. Some went to get a takeaway, some to the local supermarkets and my homestays decided they wanted to bake a cake, so that’s what we did at midnight!

On the Thursday the Young Americans came into school to set up the sports hall with all their equipment and staging. They were the most organised, productive group and within no time at all, the hall was set up for sound, lighting and staging and they were ready for the arrival of the workshop kids.

At 4pm the 90 excited students arrived and were taken over to meet the Young Americans. They performed for them, singing and dancing and explaining what was going to happen over the next three days. Suddenly the hall was a hive of activity and small groups of Hartlepool students were being taught the high energy dance which they had just seen.

Within 20 minutes they all could do the dance in their small groups and were brought back together to perform it. The whole hall was electric with energy and this set the scene for the whole weekend.

The students were placed into three groups: Yellow for primary children, Orange for KS3 girls and Blue for boys and the older girls. For the rest of the evening each group was taught separately by the Young Americans, each piece taught in less than an hour and then the groups came back together in the hall to show each other what they’d done and put it all together.

The Thursday evening ended with a singing session where soloists could sing if they liked. The atmosphere was incredibly supportive and most people felt confident to get up and sing a few lines of their favourite song. The Blue group entertained us with bits from Footloose, Oliver, Miss Saigon, and Kieran and Rhys’ usual duet. This greatly impressed the Americans and the next day they were asked to sing a duet introducing the Lion King section. Thursday ended at 9pm and everyone was very excited to start work again.

The Friday morning started bright and early at 9am with an energetic warm up and then straight into classes of choreography, creative writing and art. Each group rotated round and created dance work to ‘I believe I can fly’, and art work, poems and creative writing inspired by music and other stimuli. This work was then used to create a section of the performance called Creativity.

The workshops continued with more and more sections of the performance being learnt and also rehearsing pieces from the first day. Friday was an extremely long day and the whole group worked from 9am until 1pm without a break and then from 2pm until 7pm. Everyone was totally focused and worked incredibly hard. The energy was kept up by the Young Americans and the Hartlepool students reciprocated!

At 5pm the whole group came back to the Sports Hall and were shown what would be the Finale of the whole show. It was explained that this piece meant an awful lot to the Young Americans and that the emotion was a very important part of the piece. They then performed for the students the Lion King. At the end there was rapturous applause from everyone and also a feeling of ‘How are we ever going to be able to do this?’.

As usual, the Young Americans split the groups up, taking individuals off to work with and by 6pm the piece was complete. At 6pm the parents had been invited to come to the hall to see what was going on.

However, all the workshop kids were then taken off to continue work on their performances and the parents (and three members of staff) were told that they were actually going to join in the performance. We were taught in exactly the same way, (no one was forced to join in!) and suddenly we were all up and dancing and singing.

We had sections of various clips of music from Elvis to Abba’s Dancing Queen to Twist and Shout. Once we’d rehearsed as a group we were then told they were going to look for soloists, at this point I was told I was going to be going off with Joe to learn my section - !!!.

Manor College of Technolocy