acting

The Theatre Shed: Shed’s Shorts Cabaret 2019

disability

The Theatre Shed is a charity which “is committed to raising aspirations of local children and young adults, irrespective of their background or ability through sustainable,wonderful innovative, inspiring and inclusive theatre”. At Theatre Shed we use British Sign Language at our weekly workshops and in every production we do!

Recently at The Theatre Shed we performed for two nights only our fabulous 2019 cabaret show called Shed’s Shorts. For this show we all came up with our very own creations of performance work; From signing, dancing, poems and more.

I was in a dance group we decided we wanted to do a dance using a song from The Greatest Showman. The song we chose was The Greatest Show.

We came up with our own dance routine; as the song is quite big and the opening we wanted to keep the dance simple but also make a big statement.

For the dance we used big hoops with different colour ribbons on to create more interesting movement. We wore non patterned simple clothes to help the dance have more impact as we wanted the ribboned hoops to be the star of our dance routine.

During some of our dance we did not use the hoops instead we used simple big movements with our body. We then used the hoops again but this time making interesting shapes with our hoops.

Through out our dance we used different levels by doing this our dance became more interesting and engaging for the audience.

At the end of the show all the cast came together on stage to perform the song Think Like A River from our Christmas Production The Snow Queen 2018.

If you would like to know more about The Theatre Shed and the amazing things we do or you can donate to The Theatre Shed by becoming a Shedlight please visit:https://thetheatreshed.co.uk

How Performing Arts Helps My Mental Health

mental health

I have been a Performing Arts Student at my local Stagecoach School for the past 3 years. I have found that Performing Arts has a really positive impact on my mental health. As you may know I have mental health problems; sometimes this can be very hard to tell or explain to someone anything about my difficulties.

However Performing Arts has helped me to express my feelings and emotions in many different ways both physically and verbally. Through doing workshops in dance and movement I have been able to express how I am without having to speak all the time. I also find that dance can help me to identify how I am feeling and by doing this I can start to make more sense of my emotions and I start to feel less anxious and scared.

I enjoy singing lessons as I find that sometimes when learning a song the words really “speak” to me and I feel more connected with the song. This not only helps me to perform it better and with more emotion but I start to feel less alone. Sometimes when I singing a song I try to focus on the song’s lyrics and try to relate the song back to an experience I have had. This can help my PTSD as I do sometimes use this as a way of helping me trying to process a traumatic event from my past. I have tried this in past sessions with my psychologist.

In my acting classes I enjoy being” other people” but I have found if possible trying to use my experiences in acting has really helped me to process negative experiences. I find when I use my experiences in acting it helps me to tell the story more and the audience starts to feel more involved with the show.

I find doing Performing Arts a creative, good and safe way to express myself and to challenge my past experiences such as being bullied in a positive way!

Performing Arts is helping me with my on going journey to growing in confidence and not have such low levels of self-esteem.

Performing Arts has such a positive impact on my mental health , in the future I would love to do acting professionally!

Did you know about Stagecoach Performing Arts School and Young Minds Charity’s Partnership, to find out about this amazing partnership please check out: https://www.stagecoach.co.uk/about-us/our-charity-partner