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Question: How can you enjoy a great evening and support Forest Forge Theatre Company at the same time?
Answer: At Forest Forge’s fundraising quiz and silent auction!
From the 24th January, join us at Forest Forge for new weekly Tots sessions. These sessions will now be bigger and better than ever, with even more story telling, singing, drama, rhymes, movement, crafts and much more!
Tailored specifically for children under 5, these lively creative sessions are run by experienced workshop leader Lucy Phillips. Our usual Tots leader Lisa Halpin is on maternity leave, so the wonderful Lucy will be taking over these new weekly sessions. Lucy has years of experience working with children of all ages, and is looking forward to introducing drama to a new set of young minds!
As usual, these vibrant sessions will engage and stimulate your child, using music, movement and drama to encourage a sense of play, develop imagination and build confidence. Sessions will last for 45 mins, but we’re then inviting you to stay on for a cup of tea or coffee (with juice and biccies for the little ones) and a chance to catch-up and chat with fellow parents. Regular Tots members are welcome and we encourage you to bring a friend to enjoy the fun!
Our new weekly sessions will be on Tuesday mornings, from 10.O0am to 11.00am at the Forest Forge Theatre Centre in Ringwood. The cost is £1.50 per child, with accompanying adults free, and is payable on the door.
The first session will be Tuesday 24th January and will run weekly until the 27th March.
There’s no need to book, but for more information please call us at the Forest Forge office on 01425 470 188.
Forest Forge Theatre Company has been celebrating this month after announcing its new exciting work -The Bloom Project.
The Bloom Project is Forest Forge’s new immersive theatre project that will take place from August to October 2012. It will see the company visit seven different arts and community venues in Hampshire, taking up residency in each for one week and presenting a new play that will involve the audience.
Forest Forge Theatre Company are inviting your Little Elves to get into the Christmas spirit with a series of mad-cap creative Christmas workshops.
Young people have the chance to be transformed into busy elves for two workshops to make a Play in a Day. One group will design and make the sound, lighting and the set. Another group will devise and then perform the play for family and friends at the end of their workshop. There is also a session to keep your littler elves entertained with Christmas stories and games.
As The Phoenix and the Carpet flies out on tour, the circus is coming in to Forest Forge as our wonderful Youth Theatre presents their Christmas production of Beauty and the Beast.
The production is performed by the company’s oldest youth theatre group aged 16 – 21. It is the traditional story of Beauty and the Beast which was originally adapted by Katie Mitchell and Lucy Kirkwood for the National Theatre. Forest Forge has changed it slightly to be set in a circus and each of the cast members has learnt a magic or circus skill to perform, including unicycling, juggling, magic tricks, poi and even a human cannonball!
To launch our new Community Fundraising Pack everyone here at Forest Forge wore our pyjamas in to work last Thursday to raise funds! The actors rehearsed The Phoenix and the Carpet in their pyjamas, Dom, Carl and David were building the set in their pyjamas, and Jemma, Max and Sophie pootled round the office in their pyjamas!
Lucy and Max spent most of their week in their PJs as all of the Youth Theatre sessions last week were being done in pyjamas too. All the Groups were amazing in their PJs and managed to raise a brilliant amount for doing so! A special mention to Jemma Darnley who raised £100 by herself!
In an online article, which made the headlines on the Arts council newsletter, Forest Forge were praised for our work within museums and libraries.
The article looks at our tour of Operation Oliver from 2010 and how it is going to be touring around libraries and schools again in the new year. It is the first article in a series on good work between theatres and libraries and museums so it is a great achievement to be recognised in this manner.
The Autumn 2011 term of Forest Forge Tots continues on Tuesday 1st November where we will be looking at Lost & Found.
Forest Forge Tots are creative workshops for the under 5’s inspired by the seasons and well-known picture books.
For the first time Forest Forge is opening up its doors for young people in the area to take part in a series of fun and spooky Halloween Workshops during the Half-Term break.
Young people will have the opportunity to take part in three different workshops over the course of the week including:
Following a clear-out of the Forest Forge workshop and wardrobe, we will be holding a sale of scenery, costumes and props that we no longer need.
Items wont be priced, but anyone wishing to take things away will be asked for a donation towards the company.
Ringwood based Accountants Donaldson Ross have won the Forging Business Link scheme’s main prize – sponsorship of our winter production The Phoenix and The Carpet.
The accountancy firm, which is based in Ringwood, entered the Forest Forge Forging Business Links scheme last month. The initiative offers businesses a number of benefits in return for supporting the theatre company, which is also a registered charity.
Theatre Skills Day – the date of this workshop has been changed to Saturday 22 October.
Forest Forge Theatre Company is a professional small-scale touring company based in Ringwood which tours Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire. We specialise in creating new productions and touring to non-theatre spaces.
The autumn 2011 term of Forest Forge Tots has begun.
Forest Forge Tots are creative workshops for the under 5’s inspired by the seasons and well known picture books.
Theatre Skills Day
with Forest Forge Theatre Company
Your local professional theatre company
Forest Forge Theatre Company is a professional small-scale touring company based in Ringwood which tours Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire. We specialise in creating new productions and touring to non-theatre spaces.
Forest Forge Theatre Company are offering businesses in Ringwood and the New Forest the opportunity to work in partnership through the new Forging Business Links scheme.
The new initiative is designed to give smaller businesses in the region the chance to connect with Forest Forge’s audiences through a sponsorship competition.
David Lane, the writer commissioned by Forest Forge to write two new plays to commemorate the company’s 30th anniversary, is celebrating this week after being nominated for the national Meyer-Whitworth scriptwriting award. The Meyer-Whitworth Award is one of the largest awards for playwriting in Britain.
David Lane, who is currently working with Forest Forge on the two autumn productions of The World Outside and Born, received the nomination for his play BEGIN/END that he wrote for the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre. The production was created for teenage audiences and toured throughout the UK in Spring 2010.
This week Forest Forge Theatre Company is on the road touring a new production all about turning thirty.
Since April Forest Forge Theatre Company has been working on a very special project entitled When We Were Thirty, which has seen the company work with elderly members of New Forest communities in residential homes and day care centre’s, running reminiscence workshops with participants and helping them to think back to the year they turned 30.
Last week friends and supporters of Forest Forge gathered at the Theatre Company’s base in Ringwood to celebrate its 30th Anniversary.
In honour of the company’s long history actors, staff members and others read out short clips from four previous productions, including the very first play ever produced and Free Folk that was produced in 2010. Speeches were made by previous Artistic Director Sean Aita, founder of the company Karl Hibbert and current Artistic Director Kirstie Davis.
When We Were Thirty -
Discovering stories from the year New Forest residents turned Thirty
Since April Forest Forge Theatre Company has been working on a very special project entitled When We Were Thirty.
On Tuesday 21 June Forest Forge will be holding a Character workshop.
The session is open to anyone age 13 – 16 who wants to learn more about developing characters through drama techniques and styles.
From today young people from Hampshire will be getting a taste for working in theatre as a group of students take over at Forest Forge!
It all takes place as part of the Elevate work experience project, that sees students from two local schools join the professional team to become the cast, set designers and technical team of the company for two weeks, before touring their performance across the county.
Forest Forge is amongst the first charities in the country to use its own, unique personalised text code, FFTC30, to raise funds using JustTextGiving by Vodafone.
From today you can make donations of up to £10 to Forest Forge by texting FFTC30 and either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 to 70070 . The text message is free and all of the donation will be passed to us.
David Haworth, Forest Forge’s Associate Director has won ‘Dialogue’ the yearly new writing competition hosted by Salisbury Playhouse and Theatre Works. Scripts were invited from the whole of the South West, entered anonymously. The four finalists were treated to a rehearsed reading at Salisbury Playhouse on Wednesday 11th May. David’s piece, ‘First Kiss Goodbye’ about the confusing and tragic experience of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, was voted the winner by a panel of professionals. The prize for winning is a year’s professional development for David as a writer.
David trained as a theatre designer but has developed into directing and writing in recent years while at Forest Forge. He has written several plays for the Company. David said “Winning this competition has really given me confidence in my writing and is a testament to the faith shown by Forest Forge in this area of my work. I’m very excited!”
Forest Forge has lost 100% of its Arts Council core funding from April 2012. This is a major blow to the organisation but there is something you can do to help us….
On Wednesday 30 March the Arts Council, England withdrew its regular funding from Forest Forge Theatre Company starting from April 2012. The funding withdrawn is a total of over £117,000 which equates to 30% of the company’s income and over half of it core funding. This is a major blow and will mean some big changes for the organisation and even possible closure.
As well as touring Peeling, Forest Forge are busy with another production….
In April two groups of the Forest Forge Youth Theatre are joining together for a production of The Forgotten Odyssey, with a cast of 52 young people age 12 – 16.
The Western theatrical canon is full of disabled characters: From the pathos of the blinded Oedipus to the personification of evil in Richard III, the impaired body has often been used as a metaphor for the human condition. But seldom have the plays been written from a disability perspective, or performed by disabled actors. This was the impetus for my writing ‘peeling’ in 2002 for Graeae Theatre, Europe’s foremost company of practitioners with sensory and physical impairments. I wanted to write an edgy, inventive, and humorous play specifically for Deaf and disabled actors, which used Sign performance (theatricalised British Sign Language), and reflected the experience of disabled and Deaf women. Unfortunately so often in the media, we are portrayed as the victim or the villain – the object of sympathy, or charity, or superhuman inspiration. In ‘peeling’ I wanted to create women who were witty, sexy, complex human beings who made difficult decisions about their fertility and potential offspring; women whose lives didn’t necessarily differ so much from non-disabled, hearing women’s lives.
But the women in ‘peeling’ are actors in a post-modern production of The Trojan Women – Then and Now. They are sometimes ‘on stage’ and sometimes ‘off’ – gossiping and arguing in the shadows, revealing their recipes alongside their secrets.
This February half term Forest Forge and the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton are running a range of workshops inspired by our winter show The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
Taking elements from the show the Forest Forge and Nuffield teams have created a number of great sessions to be enjoyed by children of all ages.
The cast of Forest Forge’s winter show The Wolves of Willoughby Chase recently visited Naomi House children’s Hospice near Winchester for a very special performance.
Several of the children staying in the hospice gathered around to watch members of the theatre company performing songs and extracts of dialogue from their latest production, “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase”.
Starting on Tuesday 25 January, Forest Forge Tots is back!
A New Year of creative sessions for toddlers and young children will be starting on Tuesday 25 January at Forest Forge Theatre Company in Ringwood.
3 Men & a Suit © Forest Forge 2012
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