30/11/2017

What Youth Theatre Means To Me…

Thanks to Bradford Council, Freedom Studios have been delivering after school drama clubs in Carlton Bolling and Grange Technology College for more than two and a half years now. The young people who take part have devised and performed numerous shows, most recently in Revolution Bradford in City Hall. Klaudia Struzik shares her experience of taking part:

As a drama club or should I say as a youth theatre member I was asked to give feedback about my personal experience of what we did so far and how did it affect my life. Usually we are giving feedback through voice or video recording but personally I prefer to write as I feel that when it comes to video recordings I am not really able to fully express what I want to say. One, because the video would be 10 hours long and two, because I find it a bit stressful and I lose the ability to speak English.

So let me start from the beginning ( Yeah, I know no one asked for it, but I will write it in my own way so deal with it ) I came to England 3 years ago and I’ve never even thought about joining a drama club.

So how did I end up in one?

On the first day of year 10 we were given our new timetables and there was one position on there I didn’t understand:

‘Performing Art’

I was like ‘What in the world is that?’

Soon I’ve learnt that I will be doing drama and it wasn’t bad even though I hated my group, they never did anything and I was really annoyed by this.

My teacher wanted me to join drama club and to be honest I was skeptical about it because of my experience from the lesson wasn’t the best but I decided to go anyways.

At first it was quite boring but with time it started to become more and more interesting.

I was stressed in the beginning because I was a very shy person and I didn’t really want to speak English because I was afraid that people are going go judge me as my English wasn’t the best as it is my second language.

Fortunately I quickly realised that something like this is not going to happen so I became more confident and started to be more involved.

I don’t want to write about everything we did because we did so much, it would take forever to write. Instead I am just going to write how grateful I am to Freedom Studios for coming to our school.

Like I’ve said I am a really shy person and being in a drama club was certainly a challenge. However I believe it gave a chance to overcome my weaknesses and allowed to become a better, more open and confident person.

When I first came to England I felt very isolated as nobody in school would actually want to be my friend apart from other Polish people. I thought it wasn’t right because England was supposed to be multi-cultural and it may appear like that but my experience differs. Yes, there are people from different countries etc. but they are all spending time with people of the same race.

However, In drama club ( I know we are supposed to see it as a theatre company and I see it as such but to be honest it’s easier to write drama club ) we are mixing with people from different cultures, countries and backgrounds and personally I think this is amazing. I’ve made so many friends and they are just the best ( I’ve even met my best sister ever but let’s not get into that).

In conclusion I am really thankful  to Freedom Studios for coming to our school and helping me to develop as a person and as a performer.