Be My Baby, 2018
Our Youth Theatres are a great place to make friends, explore your creativity, and develop theatre-making skills with professional practitioners and artists.
For Summer Term 2021 we are really excited to be resuming our Youth Theatres in person.
We have some spaces available in our Youth Theatre Squared groups for young people with additional needs (see below for further information).
Our other groups are full, but we are operating a waiting list. If you would like to enquire about joining our Youth Theatres please contact us at: creativecommunities@wolseytheatre.co.uk
Week commencing Monday 19th April – week ending Saturday 17th July. (no sessions on Monday 3rd May or in half term, 31 May – 6 June).
Youth Theatre 1 (school years 3&4 / age 7-9yrs): Tuesdays, 5 – 6pm, venue: NW2
Youth Theatre 2 (school years 5&6 / age 9-11yrs): Tuesdays, 6.45 – 7.45pm, venue: NW2
Youth Theatre 3 (school years 7&8 / age 11-13yrs): Mondays, 5 – 6.30pm, venue: HEG
Youth Theatre 4 (school years 9&10 / age 13 – 15yrs): Mondays, 7.15 – 8.45pm, venue: HEG
Youth Theatre 5 (school years 11 + (ages 15-18yrs)): Wednesdays, 7 – 9pm, venue: NW2
Prices given on a full term basis.
Standard Plus: £75 (For those who can and wish to pay a little more per term, this rate will help us to provide bursary places for young people who would otherwise be unable to access a weekly group.)
Standard: £60
Second child: £40
Means-tested (Universal credit or a young person living independently): £30
Bursary (free) places are also available. Please contact us if you would like to discuss a Bursary place or have any questions or queries about Youth Theatre: RFitzgerald@wolseytheatre.co.uk
If you’re a young person with a disability or additional need who wants to explore theatre making and develop your creativity, come and join us at these weekly sessions. Sessions will allow participants to explore the world around them, build their confidence and develop their theatre making skills.
We are aiming to offer a blended offer for group 2 in Summer 2021, allowing young people to take part either in person or digitally. Get in touch with us for further information.
Monday evenings during term time
Group 1 (11-15yrs or higher level of need): 5.45pm – 7pm
Group 2 (16-25yrs or lower level of need): 7.45pm – 9.00pm
NW2, Civic Drive, Ipswich, IP1 2AS. This venue includes a changing places facility.
Groups are allocated loosely by age, but also take into consideration the level of need. We will have a conversation with each family/carer and place each participant in the group we feel they will benefit from the most.
Fees (see above).
There is no audition for this group, if you’d like to join please contact us: creativecommunities@wolseytheatre.co.uk
We know that some young people and some adults are anxious about taking part in any non-essential activity at the moment, so it’s important for us to say that the safety of our participants and staff is our number one priority.
The New Wolsey Theatre is operating as a Covid-secure venue and our Youth Theatres will be delivered in line with the most current government guidance. If you would like further information, you can view our policies and risk assessments for participatory work here.
New Wolsey Theatre Covid Secure brief
New Wolsey Theatre (NWT), like all professional companies, has to have covid-19 policies in place to protect its staff and visitors. The government has put in guidelines to allow NWT to welcome audiences and participants back to its spaces. Our full Covid-19 protocol is available on request; however here are the steps we are putting in place to make sure everyone has a safe and enjoyable visit to NWT.
Working with professionals from the theatre, young people will reconnect with learning and the National Curriculum; discover career pathways in the creative industries; develop essential life skills, and use their creativity to reflect upon their experience of lockdown, all in a safe, fun, supportive environment that is Covid-19 secure.
As one of the arts organisations that has worked with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation on their Teacher Development programme, we have been a part of a wide-ranging project that has successfully evidenced that young people’s learning can be dramatically enhanced by a practical, art-based approach to animating elements of the National Curriculum.
An ‘active learning’ approach has been shown to be especially effective at eroding disadvantage and supporting young people who might not have thrived in a conventional school environment to reach their potential.
Regardless of where your school is in its delivery plan for Science, Computing or Mental Wellbeing, our programme could recap, introduce or support the teaching of these elements of the National Curriculum.
We understand this is a period of uncertainty for the education sector, and we’d be happy to have a conversation about how we can be flexible with this work to engage with your school. Please contact either:
Rachel Fitzgerald, Creative Communities Manager: RFitzgerald@wolseytheatre.co.uk
Sian Thomas, Creative Communities Producer: SThomas@wolseytheatre.co.uk
This digital project ran online in Spring 2021. An audio drama based on ideas from the project will be created and released in Summer 2021.
Dark sky reserves are protected spaces in the night sky, free of artificial light pollution, designed to allow human beings to enjoy, reflect upon and explore our nocturnal environment.
This digital project will bring young people together to creatively explore themes including, the night-time, dreams, sleep and the cosmos. Participants will work with our practitioners and professional playwright and poet, James McDermott, to develop their ideas, which James will then turn into a piece of audio drama which the young people will record for a sound installation, in the summer of 2021.
In Autumn Term 2020, we ran Whatever Makes You Happy, a digital project for our Youth Theatre members.
The weekly online sessions were a place for young people to explore together the things, the people, and the places that they value and those things in these strange and confusing times that make them happy. It created an online community to support their resilience and wellbeing, and encouraged connectivity and creativity at the end of a challenging year.
One of our Senior Groups get creative online
Under current circumstances it is not possible for every person to perform or share their work in a public forum, but the spirit and creative ideas that came out of the sessions will be shared with an artist, who will shape the content into a piece of work, which will then be shared with family, friends and the public.
“I just wanted to reach out to you and thank you so much for including my child this term. She has had the most awful few weeks mentally and your project has literally kept her going.”
“I just wanted to say thank you so much for your time and adaptability this term! As a parent I really appreciate that you have offered my daughter the chance to take part in something different, meeting new people even though we couldn’t go out!”
“It was really uplifting and gave me something to look forward to in the week. Even just seeing the people that would normally be in the theatre group was such a relieving thing, it felt like something was back to normal 🙂 “
“I just thought it was a really good release for everything that’s going on.”
Arts Award is a range of unique nationally recognised qualifications for anyone up to the age of 25. It encourages the growth of artists and arts leaders, and inspires participants to connect with the wider arts world.
We are an Arts Award Supporter – meaning that we don’t run the Arts Award ourselves, but support schools and other organisations who are registered as centres, taking young people through their Arts Award.
Many of the workshops we offer could be part of building your students’ Arts Award portfolios, so do take a look at our ongoing workshop offers in our Creative Learning Brochure (above in Schools & Colleges).
The New Wolsey Theatre is proud to be working in partnership with schools and settings on their Artsmark Award journey. By supporting Artsmark settings, we’re helping put the arts at the heart of education, inspiring young people to create, experience and participate in high quality arts and culture.
Find out more about Artsmark here
To find out how the New Wolsey Theatre can support your Artsmark journey, contact Sian Thomas, Creative Communities Producer, by emailing sthomas@wolseytheatre.co.uk or call 01473 295930
Want to stay in touch with the New Wolsey Theatre? Of course you do!
Tickets +44 (0) 1473 295900
Email tickets@wolseytheatre.co.uk
The New Wolsey Theatre
Civic Drive
Ipswich, Suffolk
IP1 2AS
VAT No: 765325812
Charity No: 1082016
© 2021 New Wolsey Theatre
