Fly On The Wall - Post 2
See the original Red Brick article here.
Hello! Welcome to our second blog on the activities and news of Fourth Wall.
Fourth Wall is a social enterprise based in Birmingham that provides the opportunity for aspiring artistic practitioners to set up their own theatre company, and connects budding actors and actresses to the company right for them.
Launch of new company
We’re very excited to tell you about the launch of another new company supported by Fourth Wall and ran by two students from Birmingham City University (awks…)
Our new company is based in Longbridge, Birmingham, and is for 5-11 year olds. We launched last weekend and have had a great response with 13 people for the first week (very exciting!)
For those interested in the marketing side, our promotion mainly consisted of working with local media outlets such as the award winning hyperlocal blog B31 Voices, and e-leafleting through social media (check us out on our social networks sites – we’re now onto most – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram – details below!)
As it’s been our very first week, the company focused on ice-breakers and drama games (can’t beat a good drama game) to help them make friends and get comfortable with the company.
The company managers stated the main challenge was having parents there watching (a lot of pressure when they’re paying for a service). For the older companies, this does not happen so was something different that the company managers had to deal with! They stated that after a while it felt like they weren’t there, however.
Activities of other company in Longbridge
We also have another company running in Longbridge for 11-18 year olds.
We had an issue with venue so had to cancel the session (Boo hiss!). The venue which we work from couldn’t accommodate our new company, so the older 11-18 company is looking for a new venue which is more affordable.
Our main reasons for moving are that the venue we use (The Factory Young People’s Centre) is an attractive venue and very appealing to new young people who join the company. However the 11-18 year old company is now in the rehearsal stage, so it simply doesn’t need to be attractive for new members, as they now have a consistent and committed core group that are simply rehearsing.
These things may sound like small considerations – but trust us, venue is key. It can be the difference between 3 and 30 members, and making a loss or a profit.
CEO in India
Our CEO Dan Bridgewater has been in India the past couple of weeks.
He was out in Mumbai working with and learning from social enterprises to help improve Fourth Wall and social enterprise in the UK. Dan was part of a group working with the Birmingham Leadership Foundation and funded by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Dan talks about Mumbai
“It’s a crazy city with opportunities at every turn. The city and country is at a moment of high growth, so there is a lot of potential money, contacts, clients and people looking to try new things out there. It is a city of extremities – one day I was working in schools with deprived young people, the next we were bartering in the markets, the next we were on sky scrapers surrounded by slums networking with millionaires! The city can only be described as crazy”
We’ll be back in a couple of weeks to give you more of a Fly on The Wall of what we’re doing. In the meantime do please follow what we’re doing by following us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/fourthwalltheatrenetwork,on Twitter at @FourthWall_TN, on Instagram: FourthWall_TN (www.instagram.com/fourthwall_tn) and Pinterest: FourthWallPin (www.pinterest.com/fourthwallpin/)
Tim Roberts – Communication Intern