Drama in the Community - 16th October

Cardboard Citizens!!!

At the first section of the lesson today we discussed the performance by 'Cardboard Citizens' who performed in the theatre on monday.
As a group we discussed the techniques and forms of theatre that they used as a company and how those types of theatre work in a community and how they can get audience members involved in the performance.

Who to work with?

We also quickly scanned across the fact that many people, companies and organisations have heard about us as St. Marys and are interested in working with us and using our skils and theatre makers to help their cause whatever it is.
I would like to hear about each of these oppertunities in more details if we have some time in one lesson soon. I think as a group we should get together and discuss the different ways in which we can use theatre to help and work with different people.

Projection...

Gary Colland who is the Property Manager at Ham House spoke to us for nearly an hour in todays lesson about how the Nation Trust works etc.
He used a series of slides that were projected for us to see and explained to us the different aspects of the Nation Trust.
The National Trust was founded in 1895.
Currentky there are about 200 historic houses owned and managed by the National Trust.
They are the largest land owner in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
They have 4,000 paid imployees and 50,000 volunteers working with them.
They are the largest conservation organisation in Europe.
At present they have over 3,500,000 Nation Trust Members.
The National Trust is a charity and can only keep running with the help from grants and the help from the general public.

Ham House for example costs about £700,000 a year to run and mantain. Without the contributions for many areas Ham House would not be able to be kept open for the public to enjoy, this would be a enormous loss to Richmond and to England.
It is such a gorgeous estate and should be viewed and love for centuries to come.

GARDENS

For the majority of the lesson we were taken on a tour of the Gradens by the Head Gardener.
We looked at the Cheery garden, the South gardens, the Wilderness gardens and the Kitchen gardens.
Each of these gardens were used for many different reasons in the 17 Century.
I found this a very interesting tour of the gardens because i was given an insight on how the house and the people living in the house used the gardens all those years ago and how the gardens were used top promote their wealth to people visiting them.

Because i have now seen and walked through the gardens i can see different stories and pieces of different theatre that can be shown and performed in the actual grounds.
This i feel would be a different and inspiring ingredient for the christmas festivities at Ham House.

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