Posts by Lucky

Making theatre for positive change

We’re talking to all the brilliant artists we’re working with as part of this year’s Inside Out digital drama workshops project. First up is theatre-maker Vicky Olusanya, who is leading the Saturday morning sessions with our younger (18 to 27-year-old) LGBTQ+ participants. How did you first get involved in theatre?I never really did drama at school. But my friend wanted me to come with her to an after-school club at Shakespeare’s Globe. It was a space outside of school and I could be the part of me that I felt I couldn’t be at school. And as part of the

What we’ve learned from … Jo Clifford

In our digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we often look at work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our writing and performance skills. This is what we learned when we looked at a speech from Jo Clifford’s Every One. 1 When we’re feeling our way through the beginning of a drama, we’re especially alert to all the cues about what genre of story we’re watching, and the expectations set up by that particular type of narrative. At the opening of Jo Clifford’s Every One (premiered in Scotland in 2010, and in England six years later),

What we’ve learned from … Tarell Alvin McCraney

In our digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we often look at work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our writing and performance skills. This is what we learned when we looked at a speech from The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney. 1 When the lights come up at the beginning of The Brothers Size, there are three Black men in the space. Throughout this opening invocation, one is grunting with the effort of work; one is in the grip of a bad dream; the third is singing in gospel tones about the roughness of

Thinking big with Vijay Patel

Performance artist Vijay Patel made a guest appearance at last week’s digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people to help participants think about how they could tell their stories and consider their access requirements when writing and performing. Vijay has extensive experience of transforming his own lived experiences into autobiographical / political art. He developed his debut solo show, Pull the Trigger, in 2015, from some of his experiences of growing up working in the family newsagents, in order to explore queerness, work, family and migration. (Vijay was touring the show again earlier this year, when the UK lockdown forced

You must remember Pride

Yes, Pride weekend may have officially come and gone but time moves differently in the era of Covid-19 so we’re bringing you some memories of the season contributed by participants in our Inside Out digital drama club. We asked them: what was your abiding memory of the first Pride protest, march or festival you took part in?

What we’ve learned from … Moonlight

In the latest session of our online drama club for older LGBTQ+ people, we looked at this short extract from the final act of Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016), which he developed from a screenplay by the Black queer dramatist Tarell Alvin McCraney (Wig Out!, The Brothers Size). Here are a few of the things we learned from watching the scene together and talking about the different ways the two characters try to control the outcome – before putting some of these ideas into action in a series of improv games. 1 When characters enter a potentially explosive scene,

What we’ve learned from … Todd Haynes

When theatre-maker Vicky Olusanya led the latest session of our online drama club for older LGBTQ+ people, she brought this short scene from Todd Haynes’s 2015 drama Carol to get everyone thinking about how characters express themselves through status. This is what we learned from watching it together and thinking about what we’d seen. 1 In any dramatic scene, the players can be distinguished by their status. In the meet-cute near the beginning of the film, Carol (Cate Blanchett) herself displays her high status in myriad ways. She wears an expensive mink coat in the winter; speaks in a patrician

Amplifying Black voices

We welcomed our first guest artists to Inside Out, our digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people last Friday: Actors Jahvel Hall and Oseloka Obi and theatre-maker Vicky Olusanya (who was sitting in ahead of joining a session in a few weeks’ time). We’d been planning to start introducing our guest artists later this ‘term’ but the urgency of the Black Lives Matter protests led to a change of plan. So we asked Jahvel and Oseloka to bring texts to perform by Black writers that connected with them and talk about why. Jahvel performed a speech from Paul Boakye’s Boy

What we’ve learned from … Frances Bingham

In our weekly online digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we’ve been using work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our life-writing and performance skills. The Blue Hour of Natalie Barney by Frances Bingham premiered at The Arcola in the autumn of 2017. It’s a one-woman show, in which the lesbian pioneer Natalie Barney reflects on her life and art one afternoon in 1950s Nice. This extract is from early in the piece, when Natalie, on her way back from lunch with her long-term lover (the painter Romaine Brooks – that’s her portrait of Natalie, left),

What we’ve learned from … Tony Kushner

In our weekly online digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we have been using work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our life-writing and performance skills. Prior’s speech to Louis about the ship’s captain he’s discovered way back in his family tree from Millennium Approaches (Act I Scene 8) is a supreme piece of story-telling by Tony Kushner (left). Here are nine things we learned by working on it together. 1 Like many good stories (indeed, many good dramas), Prior’s tale is told in three short ‘acts’. 2 Every story needs some exposition. In this case it’s one