This month has been a busy one for Kaitlin in more than a few ways. She has been taking advantage of some free time to see as much theatre as she can and has been the length and breadth of the country watching some amazing productions, several of which have starred good friends. She has found it great fun to not only go out and support fellow performers but really great to see what’s out there theatrically at present.
In other terms, May has brought in a fair bit of Fight Direction and Combat Teaching work. People Zoo’s Production of The Trial, which Kaitlin did the fights for when it was first staged a couple of years back, has been revived for a short run at The New Diorama in London and Kaitlin was asked once again to be involved to create the fights. With new direction, staging, set and actors it was great fun to revisit and reimagine the moments of violence. Also she has been involved again with ALRA North’s final year student productions, this time working with Box of Tricks Director Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder on Game. At the end of the month she will also be setting fights for a top secret feature film… for details watch this space!
Other news is that as well as continuing her APC Examiner training, her Combat Teaching has been put to use at Oldham Coliseum where she taught a community workshop with school teachers. They had great fun learning punching, slapping, pulling hair and venting their stresses of the teaching day!
And finally, Kaitlin is delighted to be returning to The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival this year to take part in more outdoor Shakespeare spleandor and social fun. Her castings are very exciting as well this year with great parts in both The Taming of The Shrew and The Comedy of Errors. She is very much looking forward to getting stuck in and is already learning her lines. For full details of the festival and to book tickets, click here.
Kaitlin has again been “fighting” her way through April! She made return visits to St. David’s College in Llandudno to polish up their action for The Battle of Boat , and also completed work and saw the wonderful production of Daniel Taylor Productions’ version of Romeo and Juliet at The Epstein Theatre in Liverpool. Both casts were joyous to work with and she hopes she get to work with them again before long.
Other than this she has been down to Cannock to give a Stage Combat workshop to the Youth Theatre there who are performing at Cannock Festival , and has made a return visit to her friends down in Portsmouth at The HMS Collingwood RSC Amateur Dramatic Society again to put them through their paces on another APC Basic Exam, this time in Quarterstaff. They all passed and there has been a marked improvement in their skills this time round so they are already planning another course for June!
Finally Kaitlin will be back in the saddle with The Knights of Middle England again this month to practice more of her mounted combat skills. She is determined to be able to Joust before too long…
March has seen Kaitlin doing lots of Combat in various forms, keeping her on her toes after the success of D’Eon at the end of last month. There has been lots of travelling the length and breadth of the country continuing her training to be an Examiner for The Academy of Dramatic Combat, getting her students at The Manchester School of Acting ready for their APC Basic Stage Combat exam and various Fight Direction jobs to keep her busy.
After being very proud that all her students at The Manchester School of Acting passed their test, Kaitlin worked on two productions which will be staged in April. The first was for St. David’s College in Llandudno where she helped the students with a particularly tricky couple of sections in their college production of The Battle of Boat . The students were amazing and she has no doubt the show will go brilliantly. The second was with Daniel Taylor Productions who are mounting a production of Romeo and Juliet in rep with A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Epstein Theatre in Liverpool. She is particularly excited to be working on this as she worked with Danny many years ago when they performed in First Family Entertainment’s Peter Pan with Henry Winkler.
Another very exciting event this month was that Kaitlin was invited to be the Equity Registered Fight Director Judge on the panel at RADA’s annual Prize Fight Night . It was an excellent evening and she was incredibly honoured to be involved along side fellow judge Richard Wilson!
What a month… an utter whirlwind. Kaitlin has been completely concentrating on playing the titular character in D’Eon and it has paid off. The show at Hope Mill Theatre, produced by The Straight Acting Theatre, was a brilliant success. Performing to sell out audiences, who laughed, cried, stomped, cheered, stood to applaud… “the tightest, brightest and most versatile ensemble in town” (review by North West End) had a blast and there were so many wonderful reviews and audience comments. Next the plan is to try to secure a tour so if you didn’t manage to secure a ticket to see this extraordinary show, please watch this space! Please visit Kaitlin’s reviews page to see more feedback for the show and her performance.
But of course life goes on so after the show ended in mid February, Kaitlin has been back teaching Combat at The Manchester School of Theatre getting them ready for their APC Stage Combat exam and setting up meetings for Fight Direction work in the coming months. One of which has paid off already and so Kaitlin popped over to Nottingham to work on The Hucknall Passion with good friend and director, James Pacey. She has worked on this production in its several incarnations with James and always enjoys working with the community actors whenever he restages it.
There are also lots of other exciting opportunities in the works for 2018 and so Kaitlin has her bar set quite high so far for this year.
Happy New Year! Kaitlin kicked off the year with two Shakespearean Fight Direction jobs, both down in London. The first was for TNT/ADG Europe who are, rather excitingly, touring a world wide production of Romeo and Juliet. It was great to get to meet the team and look over the fights and put them through their paces. The next was for a rural touring adaptation of Lear by Bears and Vagabonds. Kaitlin loved seeing what the cast were doing with the text and had a lot of fun working with them to produce the violence in very creative and alternative ways.
And finally, after a year in the planning D’Eon rehearsals kicked off! Very exciting times.
While winding down for Christmas, Kaitlin has been getting in some more APC Stage Combat Examiner Training. Hopefully, after adding trips to drama schools in Guildford, Northampton and London this month, she will be well on her way to getting qualified before too long. She is very much enjoying it and always looks forward to observing what her fellow APC teachers have been up to with their students.
The only other thing in the pipeline at present is an upcoming production of Renny Krupinski’s new play D’Eon. As told in last month’s news it is a very exciting project and casting continued this month.
November has been an incredibly busy month for Kaitlin, almost to the point of her not knowing what’s up or down… or even what day of the week it is! It seems that every single day is jam packed full of brilliant jobs so she is very happy and grateful.
Her fight direction career is now really taking off and she is beginning to really get her teeth into some great projects as well as keeping all her regular companies happy with theatrical violence as well. So far this month she has worked with director Stefan Escreet on some lovely moments in Picnic for The Manchester School of Theatre‘s 3rd Years Finals show and also their other production of Twelfth Night. This latter show has been particularly fun because after working with director David Salter on the fights for his Hamlet at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, he has made it a particularly swashbuckly affair and excitedly told Kaitlin he was putting in many more sword fights than you would expect to find in the text, especially to use her skills. It has been great fun working with the cast to deliver this and an utter delight working with David again.
She has also been working at ALRA North again on their Christmas show The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Director Dee Evans has a very particular and beautiful movement design for the show and Kaitlin has been working closely with her to keep the fights and battles in keeping with that. It promises to be a real treat festive treat when it is on at Wigan Pier later this month.
Finally for her fight direction this month, she has been asked to provide the fights for the rock and roll panto The Little Mermaid at The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. After attaining her Equity Registered Fight Director status a couple of months ago, this is a real step up and she is incredibly excited. She has already had an initial session with the cast and creative team and is delighted to be involved.
Her acting seems to be keeping her busy too this month so it’s all steam ahead. Over the next month she will be filming with V-PAC Productions in Harrogate on a feature film called Clouds which tells the tale of a young lad called Stewart and his difficulties living in a world he doesn’t quite see in the same way as everyone else. In this mental health awareness comedy feature Kaitlin plays Stewart’s mum Susan and so far the production has been an absolute hoot to work on.
Finally, looking forward to next year it has been announced that Kaitlin has been cast as the title role in Renny Krupinski’s new play D’Eon, set to be performed by The Straight Acting Theatre Company at Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester in February next year. This is a wonderful story about the extraordinary life of the Chevalier De’Eon de Beaumont, the 18th Century French diplomat, war hero and spy who, at the age of 41, put on female attire and caused political and social outrage by living the rest of his life as the woman he now claimed he’d always been. This show is already proving to be causing a huge stir and the show is now selling fast so for more information and to book a hot ticket click here. Further very exciting casting announcements will follow soon!
This month has kicked off, quite literally, with some really interesting fight direction jobs. The first is for director Sean McGrath who Kaitlin met and worked with over the summer at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. His company Alter Ego Creative Solutions has worked closely with the police developing and sending out a show to schools that deals with the very real issue of kids being targeted by gangs to act as drug runners. County Lines is a very hard hitting piece and shows just the sort of problems and dangerous situations they can be exposed to, including extreme violence. Kaitlin had a great day with the cast setting these moments and is very proud to be involved.
Next up she is working on a research and development piece called Put Down Your Aprons with Urban Stage and Oldham Coliseum about the role of women in WW1 and the Suffrage movement and protests. The violence towards them during these protests is set to be a very important moment in the show and Kaitlin has been invited to do the fight direction for this moment. The piece will be shown to an invited audience this month with a view to being fully developed into a two act play for next year’s WW1 Centenary celebrations.
It seems to be all fights, fights, fights this month. Firstly, Kaitlin was back at CBBC‘s brilliant school room comedy So Awkward to do some more slapstick action co-ordination. It was great to be back there again with the team, and much fun was had creating some hilarious trips, falls and knocks. On top of that, before term time starts at her regular teaching placement in Manchester, she has been packing in the teaching with various APC short exam courses all over the UK. She has been training actors all over the place, including Manchester, Gloucester and Portsmouth, to fight with Broadswords, Rapiers, Small Swords, Spears and Clubs, and to defend themselves with Shields, Cloaks and Staffs… it has been intense and the results have been great!
Acting wise, this month has she worked with the very talented director Sophie Paterson on a Research and Development day for a play she is hoping to take into production next year. Kaitlin worked with Sophie when she was Assistant Director on Treasure Island at Birmingham Rep last Christmas, and it was a lot of fun getting back together with her and several other actors from the show to play around with Philip Dawkins’ play Failure: A Love Story at the rehearsal spaces at The Young Vic. If all goes well, there will be further R&D later this year and then a full production of the show next Spring. Keep your fingers crossed…
Finally, Kaitlin will be heading back to Warwick at the end of the month to get back on a horse again and do some more intensive training with The Knights of Middle England. All the riding skills she is learning, including horseback archery are very exciting additions to her CV and to top it off, she’s having a lot of fun doing it!
This month has brought some very exciting news for Kaitlin. After three long years of training and personal development, and a two day gruelling exam back in April, she has officially been added to The Equity Register of Fight Directors. All the blood, sweat and tears finally paid off and she is delighted to join its ranks, and to top it off she is one of only three women to have attained the grade and joined the list of Equity recommended Fight Direction professionals. It is a real mark of excellence and this now opens the door to many new opportunities including her first high profile booking under her new title for the CBBC hit show So Awkward at the end of the month!
Kaitlin is also continuing her Shakespeare performances and fight work in Cambridge until the end of the summer and she is therefore loving life at present!
After arriving in Cambridge at the end of June Kaitlin will be spending this month taking part in the 30th Anniversary Year of The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. The Festival employs over forty actors and creatives and in the course two months they rehearse and perform eight of Sahkespeare’s plays in the stunning college gardens all across Cambridge. It really is a fantastic opportunity and not only is the work itself worthwhile, but the social aspect is second to none! Kaitlin will be performing as The Countess of Rousillion in All’s Well That Ends Well and Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor. As well as acting, Kaitlin has been asked to direct the violence for some of the shows including Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well and King Lear. It promises to be a busy but wonderful summer!
Why not bring a picnic and see a show? All of the details for all eight plays, and also ticket booking information can be found here.
After recharging her batteries with a little holiday, Kaitlin got back into the swing of things with some fight direction for the 3rd Year Finals shows for ALRA North in Wigan. It is the first time she has worked for the school and she had a lot of fun working with the very talented students on the violence. Decades directed by Chris Hill and There Is A War directed by Alyx Tole are to be performed in tandem at Hope Mill Theatre, which is one of Kaitlin’s favourite spaces in Manchester, at the end of the month.
Kaitlin also made a little trip over to Llandudno to spend the morning with the Youth Theatre there, LYMT. She gave a stage combat workshop to the students and the teachers alike and they thoroughly enjoyed slapping, kicking and dragging each other around by the hair!
West Side Story by ReAct Academy of Theatre also needed to be “teched”, “dressed” and opened. The youth performers involved were absolutely superb and the show went amazingly well. Kaitlin was extremely proud of everyone involved, especially the ones performing her fights.
Acting wise, there was a long standing engagement to take part in and an exciting new project to get her teeth into. She has a regular job pop up now and again with AJ Bell to train their employees in interview techniques, and at the end of the month she is off to take part in The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. After such a restful start to the month it’s all go!
May looks to be quite a steady month with a just few Fight Direction and teaching jobs to take care of. Firstly Kaitlin is working on West Side Story at Oswaldtwistle Civic Arts Centre, performed by the seniors in the ReAct Academy of Theatre and has already begun choreographing the violent moments with this very talented bunch of youth performers. She’s greatly looking forward to seeing it all come together with the music, dancing and singing.
She is also working on a music video for the rap track Travel Deep with the MMU Film School. The video consists of a fight scene, a hero travelling deep within himself to battle his own demons. This ambitious project is shaping up to be a very exciting one and one which will hopefully be entered into many film competitions.
Kaitlin also has an APC Stage Combat exam course happening in Manchester at the wonderful Hope Studios, a relatively new space in the Northern Quarter. This two day course will train attendees in Basic Knife, and the Exam will give them an industry recognised qualification, if you are interested in taking part then please visit the Performance Notices page here on Kaitlin’s website for more details.
On top of this she is also heading over to York to work with the Green Hammerton Youth Theatre again, giving them an introductory workshop to Stage Combat.
The month started with Kaitlin finishing off touring in Eddie and The Gold Tops with Badapple Theatre. Having worked for the company several times over the last few years, she is very used to being on the road with them and she always enjoys the projects they send her way. The show was on the road for six weeks and was able to bring theatre to lots of rural venues all across the UK.
Once the tour had finished Kaitlin was able to concentrate on getting her Manchester School of Theatre students ready for their APC Stage Combat Exams. They had all been working hard since the beginning of the academic year and at the end of the month they took an exam which gave them an industry recognised Basic Qualification in three weapon disciplines. The year group did extremely well and the results were record breaking for the school. Kaitlin was very proud of all 27 students, and they all deserved a big congratulations by the end of the day.
At the end of April, Kaitlin took herself away for a three day course to learn some new skills. She spent a week last September with The Knights of Middle England in Warwick on a Horse Riding for Actors course and was hooked. In April, she visited them again to learn Horseback Combat skills, which fits in very nicely with her love of riding and combat! After three days she was able to ride one handed while swinging a sword, carrying a large flag, bearing a shield, lancing rings from a tilt and spearing objects from the ground. She also had a go a trick riding and discovered she could ride at canter, no handed, while shooting a bow and arrow. She admittedly didn’t hit the target every time, but her average wasn’t bad and she’s planning on doing this last skill a lot more as she really fell in love with it.
Strangely Kaitlin is having a relatively quiet and straightforward month. Kaitlin will be spending March rehearsing and touring with Badapple Theatre, playing Marion in their 60’s comedy musical Eddie and The Gold Tops. For information, tour dates and tickets please click here.
It’s nice for Kaitlin to take things easy for a change!
The start of this month has seen Kaitlin flying around all over the place setting fights and teaching, and generally tying off loose ends before heading over to York for rehearsals with Badapple Theatre. It started with a bang with three fight direction jobs which needed some careful planning. The first was for the brand new Manchester based theatre company Swaggering Crow and their production of A Kidnapping, which was to be seen at Hope Mill Theatre in Ancoats and also Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre. This dark political love comedy was written by William J. Holstead, an ex-student and star of The Trial, which Kaitlin also recently set fights for. It had oodles of violence involved and buckets full of blood tricks. She had immense fun with the cast and production team devising the tricks incorporating the set (a white transit van) and a snow shovel. The show went down incredibly well in both venues and ensured this new company made its debut with a bang.
She also worked with Marple Drama on their class room drama Extremism by Anders Lustgarten. This piece is being prepared for the National Theatre Connections Festival 2017and is a hard hitting piece about prejudice, racism and bullying. Kaitlin adores working with this very talented youth theatre group and she is very much looking forward to seeing the end result. Another project she took part in was 3rd Year finals show David Copperfield with The Manchester School of Theatre, directed by the marvellous Chris Honer. It involved a couple of tricky moments, set with difficult sight lines: a caning and an interesting slap. The latter is described in great detail by Dickens in the novel and the director was keen to stay true to this. Kaitlin worked closely with the actors and the director to recreate it accurately, and the effect in the end was excellent.
On the acting side Kaitlin took part in The Straight Acting Theatre Company‘s monthly play reading and this month was rather special. The read a brand new play by Renny Krupinski called d’Eon, and Kaitlin read the eponymous lead role, which is an incredibly challenging part. The play tells the life story and daring dos of the Chevalier Charles Genevieve Louis Auguste Andre Timothee d’Eon de Beaumont – I urge you to Google this individual as no words here can do justice to how extraordinary his life was! The group was so impressed by the piece that there are now serious talks about trying to mount a production. Watch this space.
As mentioned above, later in the month Kaitlin then relocated to York to work with Badapple Theatre once more on their revival of their much loved show Eddie and The Gold Tops. This 60’s smasher tells the tale of Edwin Pandalino, a village milkman, and his accidental meteoric rise to fame as Eddie, the mystery lead singer of a stratospherically popular pop group. It is a daft comedy that Kaitlin has loved being a part of every time, and so she is massively excited to be part of it again and hopes it was be just as fabulous as the previous tours.
Finally at the tail end of February Kaitlin took part in a charity night A**vengers Assemble, singing to raise awareness and funds for the Nottingham branch of Maggie’s. Having had the news late last year that one of her close family members had been diagnosed with cancer, Kaitlin was all too pleased to be a part of the event in support of this centre that provides respite care for those surfing from the disease and their families. The event raised over £4000 on the night and all the performers rocked the venue until the wee small hours. For more information about Maggie’s please click here, and if you’d like to make a donation to the event, you still can by following this link.
Happy New Year! After an utterly brilliant three month run playing Joan the Goat in Treasure Island at Birmingham Rep, and with it being one of the most physically and mentally demanding shows she has undertaken to date, Kaitlin has decided to ease her way into 2017 and take the New Year steadily. For the next few weeks she will be getting back to teaching her stage combat students at The Manchester School of Theatre and undertaking a few Fight Direction jobs.
The first of these will be to revisit and polish up the fights again on People Zoo‘s production of The Trial. last year this fringe show went down a storm in both Manchester and Edinburgh and its been invited to take part in The Push Festival at HOME Theatre in Manchester which invites the best fringe performers of of the last year to come and showcase their work.
She has also been approached by two other companies to work on violence in their shows, Extremism produced by Marple Drama and A Kidnapping with Swaggering Crow Theatre. Both of these projects are look to be very exciting and she looks forward to getting her teeth into them. She is also continuing her training to become an Examiner for The Academy of Performance Combat and is planning on doing another Stage Combat exam course for V-PAC Productions in Harrogate early in February… so much for the quiet start to the year!