The Stage

Happy NYT year

Published Tuesday 15 December 2009 at 10:35

I would like to thank Susan Elkin for her mention of the National Youth Theatre in The Stage’s Education and Training blog. It is a very exciting time here at NYT, the UK’s premier arts organisation for young people.

Last month we flew 18 young people to Abu Dhabi to perform in the opening and closing ceremonies of the FIFA Club World Cup Championship. Many of these young people were new NYT members, who auditioned last February around the country. There has also been a remarkable shift in the nature and work of the charity in the past few years to reach out to many more young people and to embark on some of our most challenging productions, projects and initiatives to date. A proud moment in 2008 was to see a company of young people perform in the Olympic Stadium in Beijing to a worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

This is a strong reflection of the goal NYT sets out to achieve - to advance education, particularly that of young persons in the United Kingdom between the ages of 14 and 21, through the medium of drama, music and the spoken word. We are now looking to expand our audition opportunities and to spread the word about what we do to provide an equal opportunity to all young people to discover the arts and get involved in community based theatre and new and exciting productions all over the UK.

In addition to a full and highly acclaimed programme of work involving 15,632 young people in the year 2008/09, we have also had great success this year, with new courses for mass ensemble theatre, the first graduates from our new accredited Playing Up courses and we are now venturing into a new field of creating online drama, education programmes and opportunities for young creative people through our partner website, IdeasTap.

The progress we have made so far this year is set out in this report and our ambitions remain extremely high. We are under no illusion that the difficult times are over, or that funding is being squeezed at all levels. However, recession can also be a time of opportunity and we believe that our track record and experience of working with young people across a range of media makes us well placed to realise our ambitions over the next few years with great confidence. We look forward to meeting our new applicants in our February auditions and welcoming a new year full of exciting projects.

Paul Roseby

Artistic director

National Youth Theatre

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