RADA Blogs

These last few weeks of the Lab-life have been extremely eventful. We spent all of the Easter holidays rehearsing for our performance of The Eumenides, a devised version of Aeschylus’s play, which we performed in Greece two weeks ago.

Our trip to Greece was truly a life-changing experience for all of us in the company. We not only got the honour of visiting this incredibly beautiful country with all its astonishing nature and beauty while being hosted (and well fed!) by an amazingly generous group of people, but we also had the unique experience of performing a Greek play in the 2500 year old Amphi-theatre of Ancient Messene in the Peloponnese.

Second update from Construction! We were given time and material to make personal projects towards the end of the rotation. I found the opportunity to get creative with our new skills really exciting: first I made a metal sunflower to practice plasma cutting, bending different types of metal and different welding techniques, then went on to make three intertwining sunflowers with more complicated structures and fit them into a 30 by 30 frame. I popped back into woodwork and made a little box to practice finger joints which improved my accuracy and a footstool to learn different mortise and tenon joints.

So much to say about our penultimate rotation, construction. I loved learning metal work and carpentry skills from scratch. We learned to cut, grind, bend and weld metal which I found incredibly interesting. We then learned how to correctly join wood together and cut it down to size using machinery. We also covered the really useful basics of using a hand saw, hammer and drill/driver. It was really great to understand how to use all the equipment and to gain such a large amount of skills in so little time.

I got the chance to use these skills into practise in 'build week' for the RADA productions; we made and cladded the flats for The Sugar Wife (designed by Ellen Gould) built a girder and added some detailing with a skill saw to the sliding door in As You Like It (designed by James Cotterill). It was great to learn new skills and techniques from the student scenery builders and HODs (team leaders HOD which stands for Head Of Departments) for the shows as well as from the lovely construction tutors – Mark and Jeff.

We have just done our wardrobe rotation and I was the upstage right dresser on RADA’s incredible production of Sweet Charity.

It was such a busy show, in one scene I had three quick changes and there’s much more involved in dressing than I first thought.

To start we learned about different types of fabric, different stitches and about sewing machines so that we got a real understanding of the craft before we got going on to dressing. We had fun practising some gruesome special effects make up, learning how to put on wigs and picking up quick-change tricks of the trade!

This half term our rotation has been spent in the scenic art workshop learning industry skills and putting them into practice by painting sets for the current RADA shows Sweet Charity and Our New Girl.

Firstly, we made our own little projects which were really interesting; I replicated some parquet flooring to practice my wood graining technique and we all made a fake brick wall using vermiculite to create a mortar effect.

During production work, there have been many opportunities to get involved in other events around RADA, one of which was Son et Lumiere. This translates as ‘sound and light’ and is a spectacular display of live lighting programming to music.

The two minute shows were put together by the second year lighting specialists, George and Cassie. Having just come out of the lighting and sound rotation, I volunteered to help with the ‘Get In’ (setting up) and ‘Get Out’ for the shows. The rig was huge, to incorporate all the moving lights; it took about six people per bar to rig the truss and I learnt how to set pyros (pyrotechnics – indoor fireworks in this case) up. I’m proud to have been a part of something so impressive! The Stop-Motion film of the Get In is very funny.