© Ed Collier
Our First Bite Festival 2019 kicked off at the Midlands Arts Centre on 2nd March; one of three events showcasing extracts and new ideas from theatre makers working across the region.
For the first time, three young companies were chosen to perform new work alongside the First Bite artists as part of Take a Bite – a new initiative providing Midlands based 16-21 year olds with professional development opportunities within the UK arts scene.
The first Take a Bite company to perform were the Sidney Stringer Academy, with their piece ‘The Silence Breakers’. We caught up with one of the company members, who told us about their performance and how they found the experience.
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On Saturday 2nd March, we were chosen to perform at China Plates ‘First Bite Festival’ and to say it was an amazing opportunity for us would be an understatement.
During our devising project for our GCSE Drama course, we created a piece called ‘The Silence Breakers’ from a set of poems as a stimulus. Our performance surrounded war and social injustice – highlighting the effects it has on people, and taking the audience on a journey of the lives of the characters through stylistic performance.
The ‘First Bite Festival’ allowed us to perform our piece to an older matured audience who may grasp the context and reasoning behind a performance a lot more. Before we even attended the festival, we were able to develop our piece and make it better than it was before and added new elements that made a larger impact on our performance as a whole. We were able to perform and get feedback in order to help us develop our piece even more which we are grateful for.
I think one of the best things taken from the experience was to see other actors perform their pieces. It was interesting to see the diversity and contrast between the performers. We got to see different styles of performance and new ways we could possibly perform our piece. Overall the experience was very advantageous for us in order to make ourselves better actors and create better pieces for others to see.
Thank you so much for having us.
For more information about our projects with Midlands-based 16-21 year olds, please go to our Young People page. To find out more about First Bite Festival, please contact Rosie Kelly.
Photo: Artwork for First Bite Festival