Monday 9 August 2010

Survival guide - How to cope without Summer Festival

These tips are merely suggestions from Scottish Youth Theatre's (at times rather dim) Marketing Officer. Scottish Youth Theatre is not responsible for any repercussions experienced by any of you silly enough to try these out at home (so in short, probably best not to). Here we go ...

1) Hypno therapy. You can use this to either sedate the insurmountable feeling of grief with which you are now afflicted or, to transport yourself back to the dates between the 5Th July - 7Th August 2010. Chanting helps. "God's Will" / "Hurray for Captain Phoebus" / the song from Norwegian Wood that gets faster and faster - that will work especially well.

Unfortunately, hypnotherapy can be pricey. I suggest fashioning (unless you have a metronome to hand, I don't know, you might) a hypno device out of a baseball cap with a tea spoon sellotaped to the front so it dangles in front of you. Sway your head from side to side. Easy.

2) Communicate only with fellow participants. By blocking out your immediate surroundings, you will be able to recreate the feeling of being on Summer Festival remotely. This can be tricky. So use a multi pronged approach - facebooking, emailing, phone calls and text messages all simultaneously. Another draw back of this is that you hog all of your household's means of communication, thus pricey & time consuming and not likely to be all that endearing to those that you live with.

3) Recreate the production that you were in by using print outs & cuddly toys. Blow up the images, print them out and then cut out the heads of the cast. Then stick the heads to any cuddly toys you have. Using old shoe boxes and more print outs of the production shots, recreate the set. Really small sticks are useful for set / props too. Or really small twigs, in a puppet show style with bits of the set / props stuck to them. Eugh no, actually forget that ... puppets are CREEEEEEEEEPY! No puppet like behavior. Absolutely not, shudder.

4) For the next 3 months, dress in the style of your character / one of your favourites if you played a few. This should prove very diverting as one production was set in the 11Th century, another in 18Th century Paris and another in a woodland in Norway. You will be so inundated with questions about your 'new look' you won't have time to be sad about not being at Summer Festival. Accents could be incorporated here, too.

5) Start writing "SYT - THE MUSICAL!". Audiences have been crying out for a show of this nature for, oh, positively a very long time. It should last no less than 2 hours (each way) and feature a minimum of 25 songs. The choreography should incorporate influences from the can-can, to street dance, tap, classical ballet, with a recurring parcours theme to be employed as much as possible. Plot should feature building supervisor James Rooney as the Hero, script based on Shakesperean tragicomedy. That's enough of a brief for now.

6) Start fund raising for next year - now.

7) Remember, it could be worse. You could be (insert name of one of the screeds of shamed celebrities). I'll let you use your own imagination for that bit.