WELCOME TO GREENWICH & LEWISHAM YOUNG PEOPLE'S THEATRE!

Greenwich & Lewisham Young People's Theatre aims to provide a wide range of opportunities for young people to learn through drama and theatre arts.To provide enjoyable, innovative and challenging drama and theatre experiences, within which young people feel free and able to participate.To enable young people to develop a critical awareness of themselves as social beings, and to question the world in which we live.  To enable young people to develop confidence, self-esteem, the ability to work co-operatively, and to be empowered to take control over their own learning and lives.  To enable young people to respect, share, understand, enjoy and celebrate the experience and culture of others.To enable young people to develop creatively, the languages and communication skills of theatre and drama.  To enable the fullest access possible to all young people.To take positive action to ensure the participation of those whom society has made powerless. To develop and disseminate our methodology with youth community, education and theatre workers, locally, nationally and internationally

We run Youth Theatre Drama Workshops for young people aged 8-21 Most classes take place on weekdays after school or evenings.  We run Youth Theatre workshops in the boroughs of Greenwich and Lewisham.  The Greenwich workshops take place at The Tramsed, Woolwich.  Lewisham workshops take place in Goldsmiths Community Centre, Downham and at Downham Health and Leisure Centre. Don’t worry you will not need to audition.  Places are allocated on a first-come first-served basis.  To book a place, please contact Claire Newby, the Education Manager on 020 8854 1316.Youth Theatre and Technical Workshops cost £30.00 per term (payable at the start of each term), or £70.00 per year.  Concessions are available, for more details on this please contact Claire Newby our Education Manager on 020 8854 1316

PREVIOUS YOUNG PEOPLE'S THEATRE PRODUCTIONS

The Inquiry

Award-winning participatory theatre production dealt with issue of young people carrying guns and knives.
The Inquiry was a participatory piece of theatre created to explore issues of young people engaging in gang culture and choosing to carry weapons, specifically guns and knives. The project was successfully piloted to 7 schools in Camden, Haringey, Islington, Greenwich and Lewisham for two weeks in November 2007.
The Inquiry aimed to:
- Empower young people to discuss and explore issues that are hard to embrace amongst their peers;
-Giving teachers a platform for discussing further these and related issues with students;
-Encourage positive approaches to peer learning and opinion sharing;
-Dispel the myth that the carrying of dangerous weapons is ‘cool.’

Mud City
Mud City was a new piece of participatory theatre for Years 5 and 6 that ran parallel to the broader celebratory Refugee Week programme, raising awareness of the plight of refugees, especially those in large refugee camps. Mud City was one of an extraordinary trilogy of books by award-winning Canadian author Deborah Ellis that looks at the stories of young people living in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mud City followed the fortunes of Afghan refugee Shauzia, as she copes with the difficulties of the Taliban regime, war in her country, a large refugee camp and life on the streets of Peshawar, Pakistan, before finally arriving as an asylum seeker in the UK. 
Our production is a team of actors, musicians and visual artists presenting parts of Shauzia’s story from Mud City in a day-long residency in primary schools. The audience of 9 and 10 year olds became active participants in this incredible journey, using drama, descriptive writing, music, screen-printing and shadow puppetry to explore how they might resolve the dilemmas faced by children like Shauzia.

Skate Angel
By Michael Wicherek
Toured to venues and schools in London and surrounding regions
in February / March 2008 . SK8 Angel is the powerful and emotive story of Con, a fourteen-year old boy coming to terms with the loss of his mother. He feels an urgent need to escape, to lose himself … Then he meets ‘SK8’, a skateboarder who shows him a place where only the most committed and determined will learn to fly; where he will begin to find his feet again.

GLYPT and writer Michael Wicherek bring this new play and epic poem to young adult audiences, combining the skills and excitement of skateboarding with the traumas of growing up and dealing with all that life can throw at us; setting tragedy alongside soaring moments of release. 

FUTURE YOUNG PEOPLE'S THEATRE PRODUCTIONS

Thin Ice
We developed the production during a week-long residency at Wexham School in Slough in January 2009. This is a project in the early stages of development which will hopefully lead to a commission in 2009.
The central ideas and creative starting points for the project are how do we take responsibility for the world around us in an age where selfish thought and behaviour is prevalent? How does humanity start to bear in mind the world, environment and society we are shaping? And what are the key ethical and moral dilemma’s we are going to face unless change is embraced. Our intention would be to make a hard hitting, thought provoking and poetic new play for 10 – 13 years for theatres and schools