Outreach News - January and February 2012

It’s another busy couple of months for the Outreach Team: rehearsals have started for the Senior Youth Theatre production of Writers’ Block and we will shortly start taking bookings for our schools tour of Othello in the autumn. And on top of our regular groups, workshops, and programmes, we have a few special projects on the go:

The Excel Project
The Watermill’s Outreach Assistant, Heidi Bird, starts the Excel Project this month ... and it’s a big one! Students from Trinity School have written five brilliant short plays for children from five local primary schools (Robert Sandilands, Firtree, Shaw, Winchcombe, and Speenhamland) to perform at Trinity at the start of March. Rehearsals for the plays are just getting under way, with the Trinity students helping Heidi to direct. We have a total of 77 children working with Heidi and her set of six fantastic writer/directors.

Interview Skills
Great news for some of our jobseekers: several of them have now got work since we started running free training sessions on interview skills. Every Thursday morning our regular facilitator Sarah has been working one on one with jobseekers to hone their communication and presentation skills. In a project funded by West Berkshire council, and working with Careers Springboard West Berkshire, we are running these free weekly sessions until July. The performance skills that an actor like Sarah has learnt can be easily transferred into the interview room, and we’re thrilled that the project is working so well. Fingers crossed that those jobs keep coming.

Courses & Events
We have a handful of spaces left on our Play in a Day half term courses on Wednesday 15th Feb (ages 8 – 11yrs) and Thursday 16th Feb (ages 12 – 16yrs), and a few spaces for Tenors and Bases in the Adult Scratch Choir on February 26th. Please email heidi@watermill.org.uk to book.
The Directing Workshop for students in Year 10 / 11 is now full.