Kat's Story
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The most important lesson I learned at school: possibly, the ability to get on and communicate effectively with a diverse range of people, and an awareness that achievement is collaborative as well as personal. In Year 12 or 13, five of us from our A-level Drama group were invited to spend a week working with an actor/director called Geoffrey Church, astory-teller called Jan and a group of actors from homeless people's theatre company Cardboard Citizens, exploring the themes and narratives of King Lear. It felt a bit like we were going off on a mission just reaching the rehearsal space in an unfamiliar area of North London. The week was an incredible and memorable one of sharing, risk-taking, storytelling and devising.
I remember extremely strongly a moment when, in a group story-telling session, one of the Cardboard Citizens actors volunteered a memory of an extremely vivid and violent hallucination she'd experienced as a teenager, which had heralded the start of her schizophrenia. |
I remember the moments after her very brave admission, while we absorbed what she'd said - something that was a million miles outside our own experience as young adults. I remember clearly, what felt like a joint feeling for the five of us from Tallis (and the others in the room) that we had an enormous responsibility to maintain the immense creative trust that had enabledthe woman to share that with us, and the simultaneous fragility and marvellousness of that trust. It was a landmark in an amazing week and it's a moment I still reference in my working life today.
"Another moment I remember very clearly was crouching down on the top of the link with my fellow A-level drama students, watching D H perform the final monologue in the Crucible as John Proctor to an enthralled audience on the concourse. "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because it is a lie, and I sign myself to lies..." and being blown away by how absolutely and vividly D had connected with those sentiments, and that somehow that there was a line being drawn between him aged 17 on a school roof, and Arthur Miller in 1950s America, and John Proctor in 1692, and thinking that that was monumental and transformative."
"Another moment I remember very clearly was crouching down on the top of the link with my fellow A-level drama students, watching D H perform the final monologue in the Crucible as John Proctor to an enthralled audience on the concourse. "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because it is a lie, and I sign myself to lies..." and being blown away by how absolutely and vividly D had connected with those sentiments, and that somehow that there was a line being drawn between him aged 17 on a school roof, and Arthur Miller in 1950s America, and John Proctor in 1692, and thinking that that was monumental and transformative."