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National Student Drama Festival, Scarborough, England, 2010
- Leonie and Maren in the waves -
Sunday 28th of March Leonie en Maren left the Netherlands to check out the National Student Drama Festival (NSDF) in Scarborough, England. The festival actually lasted a week (from the 27th of March to 2th of April), but we could unfortunately only enjoy the program for two days. For the participants the day would start with a workshop, then they would have a meeting where they discussed the performances from the day before. Afterwards they would see a performance (one of the 12 shows visiting), follow a workshop again and then the second performance of the day. The day could be ended with a drink at at the Spa Complex (also just called the Festival Heart).
The goal of us going to the festival was to find out if it could be an interesting festival for INSTED, and to find out if NSDF would be interested in a cooperation in the future. And of course we were looking for new members to join INSTED!
We had the opportunity to see four performances in total; Tell Tale (Park Bench Poets, Hull University), White House Institute (University of Manchester), Pheadre’s Love (Ravenrock Theatre Company, University of Leeds)and Our Country’s Good (Bristol Old Vic Young Company). The two first performances were written by the group itself and can be seen as Devised Theatre. The two last performances were based on an existing text (Sarah Kane and Timberlake Wertenbaker).
When we arrived we understood that this was not a festival for the big theatre schools of England. The director of the festival, Holly Kendrick, would not get specific about how the selection of the shows took place, but we soon found out that most of the performances were made at drama courses at universities or by university students that made theatre as a hobby. Since INSTED mostly works with students from drama schools that aim to be professional directors, we are not quite sure how interesting it would be for us to invest in a cooperation with this festival. That being said, we did see some good performances and met a lot of interesting people!
So to conclude; it was very nice and interesting to experience the NSDF in Scarborough. We both had a good time (walked a lot, got soaked in the rain, ate fish and chips, saw a crazy woman mime Wuthering Heights, met in total three amazing taxi drivers,saw great waves and ate English breakfast). And, as we already said, we met a lot of interesting people. Hopefully some of them are future theatre makers, and maybe we will see some of them at an INSTED activity in the future!
