BOVTS offers online summer school for young people

The interactive online course will cover a range of topics, with each day tackling a different area of acting technique. The emphasis is on collaboration, playfulness and developing the actor’s instincts, whatever their age and experience.

Participants will be encouraged and challenged in equal measure, ensuring the week has a positive impact on both confidence and competence. 

Sessions will be led by professional DBS-cleared actors and directors and are tailored to the age and ability of each group.

The timetable is as follows:

Monday – Storytelling

Storytelling is at the heart of all theatre – so what better place to start? Today participants will get to know each other through games and exercises which will encourage them to share their own stories. They will then use these as raw material to explore owning another person’s story, retelling a story from multiple perspectives, and focusing in on the ‘event’ of a story.

Tuesday – Improvisation

The BOVTS Workshop approach to actor training is heavily reliant on the ever-increasing ability of all participants to act from instinct – to say ‘YES, AND!’ to the moment. We initially train this ability through improvisation exercises because to improvise well is to be absolutely present with the other actors on stage while also fully accepting the imaginary circumstances of the situation you are in. If you can do these two things you’re laughing. Often literally, where improvisation is concerned!

Wednesday – Relationships

Building on Tuesday’s improvisation games and exercises we focus on creating dynamic, entertaining, and often unexpected relationships between characters in different situations through manipulation of status. More experienced groups may also explore psychological approaches to relationship dynamics, drawn from transactional analysis.

Thursday – Intentions

As will have become clear on Wednesday, characters’ intentions are always at play, even if subtly. Today we dig deeper with this idea and start to play with higher stakes scenarios, which in turn give more scope for both comedy and tragedy.

Friday – Devising/ Text Challenge

Having spent all week developing skills that give each actor real freedom we now use our whole toolkit of techniques to find that same freedom when working from text and/or a devised and rehearsed script.

This outline is subject to change at the discretion of the course leaders and may vary between age groups. Additional or alternative sessions might include approaches to Shakespeare, clowning, characterisation and acting for screen.

Performance Week

Drawing on the previous week’s skills sessions, participants will work together to create an original piece of theatre from scratch. From exploring initial ideas and characters, all the way through to writing, refining and rehearsing scenes for presentation, the group will work as a professional company and as such have control over and responsibility for the direction of the week and the work that they choose to create. Previous Performance weeks have led to work set everywhere from prisons to pirate ships.

Dates for all courses are:

Week 1 – Monday 27 July – Friday 31 July (school year groups 3-6)
Week 2 – Monday 3 – Friday 7 August (school year groups 7-9)
Week 3 – Performance Week – Monday 10 – Friday 14 August (school year groups 7-9). Please note: you must attend week 2 to be able to participate in performance week.
Week 4 – Monday 17 – Friday 21 August (school year groups 10-13)
Week 5 – Performance Week – Monday 24 – Friday 28 August (school year groups 10-13). Please note: you must attend week 4 to be able to participate in performance week.

Please note that school year applies to the year a child has just finished, not the year they will be going into. 

For more information and to apply, go to https://www.oldvic.ac.uk/course/theatre-skills/