A studious approach: Frantic Assembly Studio
Phil Cleaves
Sunday, May 1, 2022
Launching with UK schools in September 2022, Frantic Assembly Studio is a new online subscription platform designed to support teachers and students in the study of contemporary theatre-making. Phil Cleaves finds out more.
Frantic Assembly
Frantic Assembly is launching a new online subscription platform for teachers and students: Frantic Assembly Studio. It will explore the collaborative approach they have developed over their 28-year history for those educating GCSE students and upwards.
The Frantic Method
Led by artistic director Scott Graham, the company has long been committed to education with its Ignition programme and the master's degree growing around the Frantic Method. Such a commitment to teaching and training, alongside the meteoric rise in appetite for the company's work, meant that their ideas rapidly spread around schools. However, during one encounter with a school, Graham saw how the company was being misrepresented in service of exam criteria. Graham tells me he ‘didn't recognise Frantic Assembly at all. It bore no resemblance to what the company do to make work.’
For Graham, Frantic Assembly has never been one singular thing – it can be moving bodies, bodies in space, explorers of rhythm and tempo, new-writing pioneers or experimenters of digital performance, and it is through collaborative practice that all these possibilities can be explored. Such an approach is not easy in schools and Graham rails against the impossible job drama teachers are given in an education system obsessed by exams.
‘People aren't being given the space to explore and fail, and are expected to show the results of the work before they set out on that work. The attitude is often “today, I'm going to prove this theory”, rather than, “today, I don't know what I'm going to discover.”’ These qualities of openness and experimentation are what Graham believes to be the ‘huge gap between the realities of the professional rehearsal room and the realities of the drama studio.’
A starting point
Graham sees collaboration and dialogue as the way to bridge that gap, with Frantic Assembly Studio being a product of, and platform for, working with teachers. Sarah Fitzpatrick is a drama teacher at Trinity Academy Cathedral in Wakefield, and she is part of the teacher panel helping Frantic ensure that the Studio resource serves the needs of teachers. She says the Frantic Assembly leadership team ‘really listened, because the videos feature young people and there's so many modelled examples.’
Graham was keen to get across to teachers how the work is a process, and the Studio will provide models of their method but won't dictate what the outcomes will be. ‘It's really important for your students to understand that when they ask me a question and I answer it, it's not like I was always holding that knowledge in a pre-packed form,’ says Graham. ‘It's the question that provokes the understanding.’
A suite of ideas
The Studio will be a ‘welcome place that isn't just full of people doing things perfectly’ but will include clear step-by-step videos of the Frantic Method that provide layer upon layer of strategies for teachers and students. These tutorial style videos will be placed alongside extended interviews with collaborators including playwright Simon Stephens, composer Adrian Sutton and lighting designer Zoe Spurr. There will also be a collection of full digital theatre productions including Beautiful Burnout and Things I Know to Be True, with more to be added in the future. The subscription will also provide access to a suite of ideas that the company hopes will serve as stimuli for students’ own work. A staffroom will be an important part of the platform where teachers can get support with the resource and Graham is certain that this element will ensure that Frantic will keep the resource up to date, relevant, and challenging.
© SIMON PITTMAN
Co-founder and artistic director of Frantic Assembly, Scott Graham, in a workshop
‘Game-changing’
The part of the Studio that ties the whole platform together is the company's new and exclusive film Touch. This demonstrates Graham's collaborative process in devising a show with restrictions similar to those teachers face. Graham says: ‘it was an opportunity to do what teachers and students are doing in the classroom: you have your room, and you have your stimulus.’ This is a brave and exposing endeavour for Graham, but one that he embraces with the energy that has driven Frantic Assembly over three decades. The beautifully filmed performance is accompanied by insightful video interviews that illuminate Graham's thinking, including the failures that provide creative opportunity. He hopes that the Studio will become an outlet for future, small-scale creative endeavours alongside their touring productions.
Teaching and learning are at the heart of Frantic Assembly's work and Graham is determined to open doors for others as he has benefited from others helping him. However, he is adamant that the Frantic Studio is ‘there to help you make work, not to help you copy Frantic.’
Having experienced the platform as it has been built, drama teacher Sarah Fitzpatrick, believes the Frantic Studio will be ‘game-changing’ for young people's understanding of top-level contemporary theatre-making.
