Lets Face The Music

Lets Face the Music at Birmingham Rep - Tuesday 18th December

The first chance for Vicki Roberts and Pamelia Williams was a community project at the Birmingham Rep which was not over when the curtain came down. As this project finished they felt they had so much more to give in the field of performing arts. Their experience in doing Cathedral Song (started through the life skills training at St. Basils) prompted them to rethink their career paths and with a little help from the rep apprentice schemes and support from St Basils they had been given the first chance to set up their own youth theatre company.

About 12 months ago the Birmingham Rep’s Learning and Participation Projects Manager Juliete Raynsford, was asked to assist in a community play created by a group of 16-25 yrs olds from St. Basils as part of a Life Skills course, this play was called Cathedral Song which went on to be developed into a piece of musical theatre to be performed at both The Birmingham Rep and St. Martins Church in Birmingham City Centre. This was then also adapted for a radio play on the BBC. Now that Cathedral Song was so very successful the inevitable come-down afterwards led two members of the group Vicki and Pamelia to take decisive action they both decided they wanted to start up their own project.

They began writing proposals and scheduling meetings with senior management at St Basils to establish what financial backing would be required to start up their own theatre group. As a result of this they have now started running their first production with the 1st Chance Youth Group at the Birmingham Rep whilst still doing the education apprenticeship which is funded for 18mths at the Birmingham Rep. This apprenticeship is structured to cover every aspect of theatre such as understanding how a professional theatre is run, from a business and artistic perspective workshops and more.

These young women are aiming for 1st Chance to be a source of all around knowledge for everyone who wants to get involved

Their aim is to help young people gain skills such as confidence, team building, and a sense of motivation.

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To experience being involved in something that requires a sense of fulfilling aims and achieving goals and much more. They also want to strengthen goals people may have in performing arts whether they sing, dance, write poems or songs, produce music, design costumes, enjoy directing and so on. They provide a social network to put on productions and enjoy what they do at the same time.

They create a type of theatre that combines art form and provokes debate, and it is very entertaining.

Lets Face the Music is their first production.

Aged 8-18 interested in theatre, living in or near Birmingham check out Young Rep