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Jade Hale:
1997
I was 13 and I had big bushy eyebrows.
I was travelling across town to KIC workshops from North to East
Belfast, clutching my bag of sweets. I had met Dave Calvert in
drama workshops in my local community on the Cliftonville Road.
Dave invited me to take part in a 4-day programme with international
tutors. Street violence was bad that July and I was nervous, but
the weather was great and I was learning brilliant dances from
two Black kids from a project in Amsterdam. After a lot of really
hard physical work, including dozens of stomach crunches, I was
hooked. After a while friends asked me what kind of drama was
I was doing; was I a tree? What was my character? What was
the play about? All I could say was it was about me. By the end
of the year I was responsible for name-stickers for recruitment
workshops and spending every weekend training with KIC.
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1998
By now I was in both the advanced and the
preparatory groups. I was at workshops on Saturday and Sundays
with the advanced group and on Wednesday evenings with New Mutiny.
I loved the New Mutiny show, Plague Houses, which was an amazing
physical theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. In the advanced
group I was making identity collages with 7 other teenagers and
performing in community centres and conference venues. My first
identity piece was an early memory of my Dad on the street in
a row with a neighbour and me in tears, overcome with fear and
love. I was getting used to personal storytelling and putting
my story into the first major KIC production, Brainwaves. I loved
it so much I remember being late for a workshop and crying because
my Dad wanted a cup of tea before he gave me a lift to East Belfast.
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1999
The year started with a touring production
of Brainwaves which was fast, exciting and easy for teenagers
to relate to. It was my first public performance in front of a
large audience. I now knew what Dave meant when he talked about
ensemble. All the bits fitted together in the show and everybody
was great and important. Later in the year the advanced group
began to learn new skill frames, especially contact improvisation.
By the end of the year the next major production Barcodes was
based on contact improvisation and was a new departure for the
company. Every single moment of physical contact had a special
meaning. We performed Barcodes in Amsterdam that year, my first
visit to that amazing city with so many different cultures. It
was a challenge to perform a show that was about living beside
a peace wall in Belfast and making it clear to a foreign audience.
The work was becoming more demanding physically and mentally.
Company members moved on, people I had looked up to. This scared
me a little, but I was in KIC for my own reasons and I was now
taking more responsibility for myself in the company.
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2000
Throughout this year I learned what
commitment meant, because so many recruits came and went.
Most of them were sound young people, but they couldn't
cope with the demands the advanced training made on their
lifestyle. I realised that I had made KIC a priority in
my life and that was why I was getting so much out of it.
I did a lot of travelling with KIC in 2000, performing in
Belgrade, Mostar, Lille, Amsterdam. That summer I was one
of the KIC peer leadership team for the Ulster Association
of Youth Drama's Yeehar Summer School. This was a great
experience, not only because we performed on the Waterfront
stage. It was great because we were working with so many
young people and getting a lot of positive feedback. I realised
that KIC training was what young people wanted to do and
I was able to pass that training on. I think this was when
I first became aware that I was a peer leader, sometimes
teaching teenagers older than me, then eating lunch
with old people; adult tutors, that is.
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2001
The first 4 months of 2001 was intense
for the advanced group. We had been together for almost 3 years
and Dave left us alone to work on new material. By now we knew
what was good work and what wasn't. We would discipline and encourage
each other. Nerve Storm was the result. I can't begin to describe
this show except to say what it wasn't. It wasn't a play or a
dance show, but it contained bits of both. It said a lot about
the personal lives of the group members but it was the KIC show
that contained the least text. It was the most physically and
mentally demanding show we had done, but there was a lovely openness
about it. It was very precise, but it had random moments when
performers would do something unexpected each performance. Finally,
it was so different from anything we had done before and I realised
that we were so strong as a company because we kept moving on.
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2002
I am now the principal peer leader in
KIC and working as assistant to the Artistic Director this year,
Dave Calvert, and also with a brilliant dancer/choreographer Clearence
Koorndijk. Clearence is young and hip, with a mix of MTV, Brazilian,
African, and Contemporary dance styles in his work. His dance-contact
work is so spontaneous it's a bit scary. He encourages us to make
our own movement stuff and then he works it into his choreography.
I am also leading David and Puck in the KIC Peer Leadership team
for all our projects this year. David and Puck are both great
dancers in the KIC style and we are already producing some of
the strongest work that KIC has done. Our next show is about the
meaning of KIC and the space it gives us to explore and challenge
ourselves and to make sense of things around us. It is obvious
by now that without KIC my life would be normal. I would not have
six-pack stomach muscles, I would have a bad diet and I would
be just a little bit bored.
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2004
In the first 3 months of 2004 I will have worked as Assistant
Director on 2 very different KIC shows. New Mutiny is such a fun,
mixed ability group, with so much energy and enthusiasm. I have
to constantly remind myself that I am working with a children's group and the discipline as a leader is to have ways of calming
the group down so that it becomes more focused. It is a very challenging
experience because children want to do and show different things
than teenagers. Children are less inhibited than teenagers, but
they get bored easily. Fantasy work holds a 13 year old's attention
longer, which means that the work is more playful for longer.
With the KIC Core Group I am working with 15-18year olds who have
strong opinions about the world around them. The current core
group that is devising Mercury Tilt looks to me for help with
moves and choreography that is relevant to their interests, and
there are very varied interests in this group. They also look
to me for structure for their ideas, which is a big responsibility.
I have to challenge teenagers who have been in KIC for almost
2 years and have become very skilful. It is nerve-wracking to
think that we will be touring for the first time in 5 years and
a lot of people will be looking at me as a performer but also
looking at my choreography. I know I can cut it as a performer, but I will
soon find out if people like my choreography.
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