The new year

It's been an extraordinary, hectic, non-stop first few weeks of the year.  Time has flown by and we're still doing a lot of set up for a really exciting year ahead.

In a week or two we'll be launching our plans for 2012.  Last summer we started developing our first formal artistic policy, trying to wheedle it out of our heads and get it down on paper.  It's a hard thing to do - we all have a sense of the work we want to make and the impact we want to have but that's often hard to articulate in a single document.

It's sometimes hard to remember that we're only a very young company - formally only 3 years old and only really at full capacity and output in the last year or so.

One thing we know for sure is that we want to continue our focus to be primarily on young people.  We've flirted in the past with working with adults (including an intergenerational dance theatre piece and two plays cast with professional adult actors), but we've decided that we should focus on doing what we do best, our work with 10-25 year olds, at least for the time being.

Something we're increasingly sure about is that a key element of our work is creating a space in which young people from Islington and amazing professional theatre-makers can collaborate together in making theatre on an equal basis and for the mutual benefit of both.  With this in mind we're working with a really wide range of theatre-makers this year, including the directors Emily Lim, Ola Ince and Dvora Liberman, the playwright Alexandra Wood and various movement directors, technicians, film-makers and other associates. 

We're also commissioning five new short plays from five brilliant playwrights (we'll announce them soon) that will be inspired by conversations with our young people, who will then direct and perform them.  The working title for the project is What Will Survive of Us and it's going to be an exploration of where we've come from, who we are now and what we'll leave for the future. 

Working alongside that - and tied up with a real desire within ICT to delve deep into the stories that make our young people who they are - we're also launching a brand new playwriting project called Speakeasy, a weekly underground writing collective of young people aged 14-19.  Led by the playwright and tutor Brian Mullin, it's a really exciting new venture for us.  Again, it'll be launched formally on the website very soon.

And that's just the start of it.  I'm writing a play in conjunction with 30 members of our IYT company (it's about time, which is either extremely zeitgeisty or totally derivative - see here and here).  We're developing our relationship with the excellent Platform venue through our new weekly drop-in workshops; we're looking at a new commission in collaboration with the Rosemary Branch and lots more. 

All of the above will soon feature on this website, as and when we have final confirmation of titles, creatives and performances.  It's a really exciting time.  And a super-busy, exhausting, inspiring, brilliant one too. 

Countries apart

Totally wonderful night last night with fifty of our young people at the Unicorn to see Blackberry Troutface by Laurence Wilson and 20 Stories High, a company which in lots of ways are quite similar to ours.  They have a great website too.

20 Stories were kind enough after the show to do a talkback and our young people were full of questions about the work, how it was made and, in particular, how the actors in the play got to where they are.  A lot of attention was on their Liverpool accents and my absolute favourite question, asked in all innocence, was "Can you do English accents as well?"

I think it says something about the trust and kindness we have in this company that getting 50 young people from Angel to London Bridge on the tube at rush hour was the easiest thing in the world. Even for one of our 12 year olds, for whom it was their first ever trip on the underground.