Use your noodle: sign up for Expo

A head of this year's Expo at Old Trafford on 10 October 2019, I had a lovely chat with Nikki Johnson, founder of Noodle Performance Arts which offers training for young people from pre-school to teenage years in and around Sheffield and Cheshire.

‘We came as delegates in 2017,’ Johnson explains, ‘I brought one of my franchisees and some staff members to see what it was all about. We’re a new franchise and were looking for franchisees, and I just thought it would be an excellent place for us to come and find the right kind of people.’

Johnson and her team attended sessions including one from Trestle on masks and musical theatre, of which she says ‘we got some great ideas, and came back with some masks which we’ve never used in drama before. It was really good.’ They also attended a session on early years music and loved the interactive nature of it, sparking lots of inspiration.

Building a network

In 2018, Noodle Performance Arts decided to exhibit at the Expo themselves, and they’ll be returning this year. ‘Two of us come together,’ explains Johnson, ‘which is useful because it means that one of us can go off and see what’s going on and chat to other people. ‘We had a pod in 2018 and we’re doing the same this year: we just bring pop up banners with us and a screen, we find it’s really about talking to people, we’re keen to find people who are right for our business as well as us being right for them.’ Last year, attending as exhibitors for the first time, Johnson was pleasantly surprised by the sense of community on the show floor: ‘I found I got a lot of support from some other people that were exhibiting, which was a bit unexpected but nice! We had a lot of interest in the franchise, spoke to lots of people, and I made contact with other franchisers which was really good from my point of view, being new to it.’

However, she also managed to pop along to some sessions – the advantage of bringing a colleague to tag-team manning the stand – particularly enjoying Disney’s energetic singing session at the end of the day, as she is, she tells me, a singer herself: ‘I’ve been in performing arts from being a child. At the age of 15 I started performing professionally as a singer. I danced professionally for a while…and then I went to work in banking, as you do! ‘So I got a lot of good business training, learned about marketing and things like that, and then I was made redundant from banking and wondered what to do next. I thought “why don’t I use the skills that I’ve got and set up a little class?” I started a performing arts class because there was a gap in the market near us for pre-schoolers.’

A colleague of Johnson’s wrote an article for a local newspaper and they opened with eight children in the class. ‘And then,’ she says, ‘it kind of just went crazy. Within a year we’d been asked to launch ballet classes so I brought Jess on board who’s a dance specialist, and we’ve now got more than 600 private students in the Sheffield area. We also teach in schools and nurseries, and we work with Sheffield libraries and do workshops. So we’re really busy.’

Franchise opportunities

‘We employ about 15 people’ Johnson tells me, ‘and we decided to franchise the business a couple of years ago and now have one franchise running in Cheshire. Now we know that the formula works and it’s been successful for someone, we can start to really promote it and get ourselves out there – so that’s part of the reason that we’re coming to the Expo. It is tough finding the right people to franchise: I think a lots of people are interested but people often underestimate the amount of work that needs to go into running your own business.’ One of the most interesting things to come out of my chat with Johnson, of particular value to any readers who may be thinking of starting up extra-curricular performing arts classes of their own, was the news that it doesn’t seem possible to saturate the market.

When Noodle Performance Arts was set up, she tells me, ‘we were surrounded by provision of that kind. I set up in the village where I lived, and there are two really established dance schools in the same village and another in the next village. People say “I don’t want to set up in my area because they’ve already got Stagecoach,” or Razzamatazz, or whatever it might be, but I do firmly believe that everyone’s different. We’re not right for everyone, and Stagecoach isn’t right for everyone.

I think there are enough people out there interested in the performing arts for everybody to work together and find their niche. Our USP is that we’re affordable: we run shorter sessions that mean that children who normally wouldn’t be able to access part time theatre schools can come for an hour or an hour and a half if they’re between the ages of 3-11, rather than having to come for three hours as in traditional part time theatre schools. And it’s learning through fun, so I think we do get a different demographic.’ ‘We are about to launch a charity called the Noodle Foundation, so we’re hoping to reach out even more to children who can’t access performing arts training, with bursaries, but also to be able to go into underprivileged areas and schools to offer classes.’

www.noodleperformancearts.com

Expo | Manchester 2019: the programme

It has become traditional for me to give readers a walk-through of the Expo programme through the eyes of an intrepid band of (fictitious) delegate friends and colleagues who dutifully attend every session appropriate for drama. Last year we met Craig, 28, a secondary teacher who heard about the expo from his friend Lucille and tripped along to Old Trafford to see what the Manchester show had to offer. This year, Craig, now 29, will be really delighted to discover that the number of drama delegate-applicable sessions equals the number for music, the first time in the history of the MDEE that we’ve achieved absolute parity for drama…read on to find out more.

Craig returns to Expo

At 9:30am on 10 October 2019, doors open on the Music & Drama Education Expo, and Finn (32, Year 6 classroom teacher) is champing at the bit to attend Beat Goes On’s perennially popular warm up with STOMP-style body percussion.  For Finn, this is the first of a whole morning of sessions she can take ideas from back to her primary classes. The first session of the day in The Space is another of these: ‘Drama: A most effective link’ from David Bedward presents the extensive reach of drama into other subjects, focusing primarily on languages.

Using drama in this cross-curricular way to teach other subjects is something Finn is really keen to encourage among her colleagues at school, and she’s even set up a training session in which she plans to impart to them some of the wisdom she’s picked up on this topic at Expo. At 11:10 Geoff Smith brings to Manchester the most popular and talked-about drama session from Expo | London 2019 – ‘Creativity in the Primary Curriculum: Blodin the Beast’ which naturally also fits perfectly into Finn’s plans, so she pops along to that, and then drops in on Nikki Johnson at the Noodle Performance Arts pod for a chat about extra-curricular teaching opportunities, before heading back to school for her afternoon classes.

Meanwhile, though, our old friend Craig (who has been given a new post since last year, as student well-being lead) has arrived from Liverpool. He’s already been to Judith Kleinmann’s 11:15 session on Alexander Technique and is on his way to combat performance anxiety with Nick Bottini at 12:30. His colleague Kaadiha, chiefly responsible for the Year 9-13 drama groups, is attending Kim Waldock’s session on Pathways to theatre work, to learn about careers in the arts industry available to her students which don’t require them to stand on stage or in front of a camera. 

She has to duck out a few minutes early in order to be in The Space at the start of the National Youth Theatre’s session on Performing Shakespeare because she has more than one student who would be interested in applying for the NYT’s next round of auditions. Then at 13:45 she’s in the right place for Catherine Nash’s The Soft Sell: Promoting drama in a sceptical world.

‘Sceptical’ is a polite term for the attitude of some of the parents Kaadiha has encountered over the years, and Catherine’s session is a real help, with a host of useful perspectives to put across to the nay-sayers. Paul Sutton is in The Space at 15:05 sharing Five ways to integrate digital technologies into classroom drama and Kaadiha and Craig both pop in to learn more about this hot topic, after which Craig has one last session to attend before the shared train (and the premixed gin and tonics) back to Liverpool. 

Helen Barnett’s participatory session Unmasking well being uses mask work to explore identity and emotional well being, and neatly rounds off Craig’s day of sessions to support his new role in school. It’s been another brilliant Expo, and the gin and tonic is merely the sparkly icing on the cake. D&T

www.mdexpo.co.uk/Manchester