With studios fitted with sprung dance floors, full-length mirrors, a large performance space, kitchen and common room facilities, central London has an impressive new arrival in the form of the Boury Academy Studios. Located just a stone's throw from Vauxhall underground station, the studios are right opposite a shiny new branch of Gail's Bakery.
Its glitzy facilities and superb location are partly why the studios are taking so many bookings from professional theatre companies, but unlike other rehearsal spaces in the capital, the Boury Academy is a community interest company established to benefit the neighbourhood in which it sits.
Directed by West End performers Caroline and Rakesh Boury, Boury's goal is to provide training, inspiration, and a potential pathway for young people into a profession that can often feel inaccessible to anyone but a privileged few.
Funded partly by the revenue acquired from rehearsal hire, the new space means they can offer an expanded timetable and even greater opportunity to the young people that currently attend weekend workshops with them.
First steps
Boury Academy started as a side project for Caroline while she was between roles as an actor. In the last five years, the project has grown exponentially and now includes an agency to represent selected students. But it isn't industry success that drives Caroline. She is committed to the Boury Academy as a space that supports young people as much as it inspires and trains them.
A place of purpose
When she first recruited additional facilitators, Caroline found herself explaining that her students were not Stagecoach kids. They come to class with more character, more energy, and sometimes much more on their mind than young people who had grown up in youth theatre. Based on some of her early interactions, it's now critical to her that the common room is somewhere for her students to be themselves outside of school and home. She insists that there is food in the fridge if they need it, and there are coats in the costume store if they are ever forced to go without. The impact is perhaps most visible in the original cohort, who are now 16 years old and take full responsibility for supporting new recruits, helping them to understand the particular ecosystem that Caroline has established.
It's time to grow
The academy had been looking for a permanent space for many years, so when the top floor of the Wyvil School in Lambeth became available Caroline was ready to strike. Over lockdown she had made it her mission to attend as many relevant council meetings as she possibly could. This meant that when she was ready to apply for funding, the powers that be would remember the name at the bottom of her Zoom window.
It worked. Thanks to her newly forged contacts at Hyde Housing Association and Lambeth Council's Youth and Play team, she was able to not only raise funds to set up the studio but there was also enough good will to recruit their volunteers into fitting these spaces too. Alongside a troop of young performers, council and housing association employees laid new flooring, painted over magnolia walls, and gave the top floor of a tired Victorian building a new lease of life.
To realise the Boury dream, it has taken a shrewd business mind, but a lot of hard work. Caroline heard about a dance academy closing down in Woolwich and got in touch to ask if there were any resources that could be passed on. She was offered as much sprung dance flooring as she could carry, so she and the team gratefully dismantled it to rebuild back in Lambeth. Old pianos have been retuned and so many costumes donated that they have enough sequins to kit out Dream Girls four times over.
A time and a place
Caroline and Rakesh ran sessions remotely right through lockdown, meaning they were able to remain a positive force in their students’ lives when everything else was going quiet. But now that sessions are back in person, Caroline has noticed the real impact of that period of isolation.
Although the students are still good at expressing how they feel and what they need at a personal level, they are not as good at being empathetic to others. When they hotseat characters, the students often struggle when faced with questions such as ‘who loves you?’ or even ‘where do you want to go on holiday?’.
Those invisible social threads that keep us connected have been severed, highlighting the real importance of play and social interaction in the development of young lives. If we thought there was a need for spaces like the Boury Academy to exist before the pandemic, then the past few years have proved that the work they do is not just positive, but essential.
Classes run every weekend and on Monday evenings. The two age brackets are 4-7 and 8-16 years. Fees are as affordable as Boury can make them, with scholarships and discounts available.
Lambeth Schools Flashmob: Every year, the Boury Academy runs the Lambeth Schools Flashmob. Students can learn the full routine on their website and be part of the big performance in July.