Newcastle’s Northern Stage is offering young people from the North East who are between the ages of 16 and 21 the opportunity to help create a stage version of David Almond’s novel A Song for Ella Grey.
This new production of the award-winning novel will première at Northern Stage from 5 to 16 September before touring. It will be adapted by Almond himself and directed by the venue's Artistic Director Lorne Campbell who will work with a creative team consisting of choreographers Martin and Debbie Hylton and musician / composer Mariam Rezaei.
The team will create the show with the help of more than 100 young people from across the North East in a series of free workshops to create film, movement and sound for the show. Each week, participants will develop skills including performance, film making, voice, movement and writing, creating material and then capturing all the magic on film and audio which will be incorporated into the production.
A Song for Ella Grey was winner of the 2015 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, as well as being shortlisted for The Bookseller Young Adult Book Prize and nominated, in 2016, for a Carnegie Medal.
Felling-born Almond is regarded as one of the UK’s leading writers for young people and is the winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, Whitbread Book Award and Newbery Medal. Previous local productions of his work include the operatic version of Skellig at The Sage, Gateshead in 2008, Miracle! An Opera of Two Halves at Sunderland Minster (2015) and The Savage at Live Theatre (2016).
Almond's story sets the myth pf Orpheus and Eurydice in teenage Tyneside. Travelling from the beaches of Bamburgh to the bridges of Ouseburn, it is a wild and darkly romantic story about the seductive power and pain of being sixteen and in love. According to Marcus Sedgwick, writing in The Guardian in October 2014, “A Song for Ella Grey is a triumph.”
To find out more about the workshops or to sign up visit the Northern Stage web site or e-mail [email protected].