St. Brides: My Carbon Footprint
22-26 October 2007

     My week was an interesting one. Full of learning, getting to know the other actors, working with the actors and finally putting on a play with music and lyrics all in a week!!

     Now that's hard for professional adults, but for kids aged from 13-16 it was really hard work. From the start of the week we faced two major disadvantages: 1) Instead of the usual amount of 16-20 shouting teenagers all wanting to get their say, we had 27 shouting teenagers all wanting to get their say. 2) We didn't know what a carbon footprint was!!

     Luckily on the Monday it was all about getting to know the others and obtaining more information, so we went on a 'scavenger hunt' across a part of London! This involved me holding up a sign plainly saying 'ECO-WARRIORS' while I did my best to look insane but pointing this out to everyone I saw, normally getting perplexed looks but sometimes smiles (at me of course, not with me). Then we went to a fully organic restaurant and learned a lot out of that.

     Tuesday we worked a little on getting to know each other but mainly it was acting skills and seeing who could sing well, boy did they get a surprise when I sung my solo!

     Wednesday was all about music and costumes, where we made a costume out of rubbish Tesco shirts, and learned the words to songs and we made our own lines to the song but keeping the tune.

     Thursday we did a lot of acting and memorised the words overnight, we danced (which ended with me learning a smooth little piece of professional dance) and we pieced it all together to have a great play!

     Friday we just rehearsed however from fear of US dying of boredom! We had lots of breaks and ordered over 15 boxes of pizza from … PIZZA HUT! The play went smoothly and all was well, a little bit of nervousness but when you act to over thirty people who hardly had a sense of humour, you're bound to be nervous. Despite there being no sense of humour my joke about 'not making any sudden movements' to a friend beside me as we were getting eaten alive (not literally) by a girl for dropping litter in a scene brought down the house!

Tom Chapman
October 2007

This page is maintained by Colin Hicks; Comments by e-mail are welcome; Return to the TBC Home Page;   Copyright information;