Young Actors Win Edinburgh Opportunity

The independent arts charity Ideas Tap recently announced the winners of a competition to get £10, 000 of funding to enable young creatives to perform at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

We spoke to the director of one of the winning groups, The Bridge Theatre Company, about what this money means to them.

“My name is Rosie Ross.  I spent two years at The BRIT School of performing arts studying theatre, which I followed with an Arts Management course which is also on offer there.

The course is based around arts and events management. Previous years have taken shows to Edinburgh, and this year our company, which is made up of 13, 18 and 19 year olds, has decided to do the same.

In September we interviewed Simon Vinnicombe, a successful playwright, and got him on board to write an original play for us.  Collaborating with a professional writer and having him create something new and original specifically for our company was just amazing.

We also have a fantastic director, Simon Stephens, who is genuine mentor for us.  He has taken his own successful work to Edinburgh before and he has guided us from September, being part of our play as it grew from ideas in the rehearsal space to what is now a fully realized text.

None of us has ever been involved in performing in or producing a show in Edinburgh before, but as a company I think we knew that if we worked hard and really organized ourselves, we could make this a fantastic piece that could hold its own on any stage.

We were prepared for some hardcore fundraising and have been running events since September 2010 – our film nights and Valentines Balls have raised over £600 so far.  We even made a calendar celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the BRIT school, and all proceeds from that go to our company.

Then one of our members, Jonell Rowe, saw the IdeasTap award on their website and brought it to our attention. Immediately we knew we should enter, to gain some experience of applying for funding and maybe even be successful!

Having not been to Edinburgh I felt like I couldn’t tell the judges the show was something that was definitely going be a hit.  We organized ourselves and all the relevant paperwork as best we could, but I think our inexperience definitely worried us at the time.

I knew we had a committed and multi talented company, not to mention a show by a fantastic writer, but you never know exactly what the judges are looking for.  The best I could do when I was organising my pitch for the interview was be honest about how I felt about the play – which was proud.

The interview was in January, so we already had a lot of fundraising organized, as well as the final draft of the script, which was so exciting!  We were determined to come to Edinburgh, with or without winning the funding.

Fortunately IdeasTap held true to their aim of helping young artists, and provided us with some stepping-stones to get into the industry.  The fact we are all fresh out of college and eager to make this play the best it can be may even have helped our application; and now as well as this funding we have gained more mentors at IdeasTap who have been incredibly supportive and resourceful.

Our play is called Show Me The World, and centres around three unrelated characters and how they use technology to communicate and interact with the outside world. Are social networking sites allowing us to portray ourselves honestly? Or are we hiding from the real world to make a ‘better’ more appealing virtual world for ourselves?

We are doing a preview performance at the Brighton Fringe on May 27^th, and then we will bring the show to Edinburgh in August.”

For further information about the company and their Edinburgh shows, follow them on Facebook or Twitter.