Playwrights, Authors & Actors Visit The Spectrum Centre. Many within the Shankill Road Area will have heard about the play Crimea Square, 100 Years of Shankill Road History. How it came about, & who took part in it. A Beginners Writing Class was initiated by the Spectrum Centre. Master Playwright Jo Egan was brought in to take the class. An invitation was sent out to the community, for people to enrol in a Beginners Writing Class. 4 members of S.A.S.H took up that invitation & enrolled in the class. Other joined also, however after a few months, they had left & only the S.A.S.H members remained. After a few weeks in the class, Jo Egan, having realised that there was a real interest being shown by those involved, decided that we should try to write a play about our history, & as, at that time, it was nearing the anniversary of the Ulster Covenant we decided to begin in 1912 & write about an event of historical relevance, within each decade thereafter, until we got up to present day. More than two years later, with the majority of the play wrote, invites were sent out to the community yet again. This time people were being asked to participate in Acting Workshops, Classes, within the Spectrum Centre. Over the next 6 months people walked in off the Shankill Road to give acting a go, joined by people from other parts of Belfast & beyond. As they progressed professional actors were also brought in, Marie Jones, Jo Donnelly, Matthew McElhinney & Marty Maguire. This process took the guts of 3 years from start to finish, with the opening night being on the 17th of October; it closed on the 2nd of November, having played for three weekends, 11 nights in total, to an average of 150 people a night. The response, it won the Belfast Queens University Audience Award. A great success for all involved. As a member of S.A.S.H, & of the writing class, I know that I have learnt from my experience, & I reckon this would be the view of everyone else involved. This play gave dozens of Shankill people the opportunity to learn how to Write, Act & Sing, as well as giving us a chance to see how the production staff work, the sound man, the film maker etc. To get these people to come to the Spectrum Centre is brilliant, Marie Jones, Stacey Gregg, Dan Gordon, Robert Niblock, Lucy Caldwell & Christina Reid, are the best at what they do, & if you have the smallest of interest at all in Drama, Writing, Acting, or in wanting to learn about how we, Shankill Road People can learn how to get the real story & history of the Shankill Road, our home, across to others after years of it being blackened & vilified, then these are the people we need to be going & listening to. We must learn to tell our own stories, for no one, as we all know, will tell them the way in which we need them to be told, which is openly, honestly & fairly, a reflection of Shankill Road People. Shankill Area Social History.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 16:54:13 +0000
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