The Courtyard Student Company

The working life of an actor and the creative teams in the arts

The Courtyard Student Company is a weeklong work experience project for year 8 and 9 students with an interest and passion for the arts. The aim for the week is for students to devise and produce their own production with the help of the different departments at The Courtyard. This will be a unique insight into the working world of the arts and will enable the young people to experience what many people will perhaps not have had the chance to experience before.

The week will be co-ordinated and ran by The Courtyard’s education team and will work alongside the technical, marketing, programming and front of house departments to ensure the group of young people are given an insight into the working world of the theatre.

We anticipate a lot of people being interested in this project. It’s an ideal chance to really explore the different departments, whilst still getting first hand acting experience and a chance to perform in the studio theatre at The Courtyard. We are therefore asking for the young people to fill in an application form so that we can prepare for the number of young people interested in the week. Every applicant will be given an interview slot.

The young people will not be required to prepare anything in advance. Once we have received all the applications we will hold interviews in groups of 10 – 15. This will give us an opportunity to set small group tasks and give an insight into how the young people work as individuals and as a team. Depending on the quantity of applications we get will depend on how many interview slots we will have to do, but we anticipate that we will be able to do the interviews on 1 day and preferably on a Saturday. The date for the interview/audition is yet to be set, but we will do as soon as we have received all of the applications.

As this is open to all Secondary Schools in the County we will try to ensure a mix of students in the interviews with an aim of taking at least 4 students from each County school. We will ask for each student to make a diary each day in order for us to track the effectiveness of what we are doing. The group will also be asked to feedback their thoughts on how the week went so that we can improve and build upon for 2011.

Many of our staff have different experiences on how they entered the arts profession and this is something that we will inform the students about. Many think it’s all about going to drama school and then busking on street corners. Although this is a route into the arts, it’s not the only route and part of the week will be about how they are able to go about it. What might suit the more academic student, and what might be more beneficial to those that aren’t. The arts’ is one of those fortunate careers where the main thing you need is passion and that is what we’ll be looking for during our recruitment process.

The biggest thing that we ask from schools is to allow up to 4 of your students leave from school for a week. The week that we have put in our diaries is the w/c 5 July 2010 and w/c 12 July 2010.

We would obviously also like for you to inform your students of this opportunity and flag this up to as many students as possible. Although this will be of interest to many of the students with a passion for drama, it may also be of interest to anyone who is interested in technical and computing. To the right hand side of this text you will see an application which you can download and complete. The application deadline is Friday 28 May and the cost for the week is £45 per student.

Child Protection

The Courtyard has its own child protection policy that it adheres to at all times. If you would like a copy of this please click on the education tab at the top and the policy can be downloaded underneath the image on the right.

Insurance

The Courtyard has adequate insurance that covers all staff and young people in our care. This has been seen and checked by Herefordshire Council during February 2009. If schools would like to see a copy of the insurance certificate, one is available on request.

Risk Assessment

Each department within The Courtyard will run its own risk assessment depending on the activity they will carry out with the young people. Our technical department already carry out risk assessments for each performance and this would be no exception to the usual production process.