Hello there performers!
For this months blog post I thought we could discuss our home; The Performance Studios in a little more depth. As we have grown so much as a family in just this past year, expanding to well over 50 brand new students since September 2023 alone!
So hello there to all you new and beautiful people, where shall we begin? Perhaps at the very beginning? It is after all a very good place to start (get the reference? Hehe)
The Performance Studios began all the way back in the year 2020 during the time of Covid (how was that almost 4 whole years ago?) when our Founder and Creative Director Miss Ciará wanted to make a difference to Lancaster and offer the town a safe space for children and young adults to express themselves freely and learn all about the arts in a fun and creative way. During the pandemic children’s wellbeing was decreasing so this is what the world needed! And there within Moor Space, The Dukes is where we began, on one Saturday morning with only 14 students, so definitely a far cry from our 6 classes across the entire weekend with over 100 students!
The Performance Studios has faced many challenges over the years, as I’m sure a myriad of companies and small businesses did particularly within Covid times. Whether it be social distancing preventing lessons from running as they usually could (we would paint red squares on the floor to socially distance the children), lockdown stopping all in person lessons (we created online lessons) or one way systems to keep the studios running all while wearing masks to teach our children! Here at The Performance Studios, we believe that if you have a dream, you should never stop chasing and working hard for it. So that’s exactly what we did, we had our social distancing squares on the floor, zoom classes anything we could to support the children.
When things started to reopen we were the first on the local stages with many an event in-between, such as; Highest Point Festivals, Light Up Lancaster, Christmas Carols at Kanteena, Lancaster Music Festivals, leading all the way up to our first ever big show Take One: A Night at the Movies (which was SO successful that we made them a yearly occurrence), The Mini Oscars and Take Two: Dare to Dream. We offer a range of events and shows for your little ones as we believe the best place to learn about performance and stage presence is of course… the stage!
And now here we are, in 2024 with a rather exciting year ahead for us. We have our Mini Oscars coming up again this April (make sure you’ve got your tickets and fancy attire) and our big summer show whose theme has not yet been revealed (how exciting!). We are so proud of how far we have come and just how much we have achieved as a company within only a short amount of time; even having won some awards for our studios such as; Creative Industry and Health & Wellness Champion 2023, Miss Ciará winning Young Person of the year at the Lancaster BID Awards just to name a few.
But always and forever at the forefront of The Performance Studios are our INCREDIBLE young performers whom of which work so hard within the sessions building themselves up to be stronger and more confident versions of themselves every single session, their families who bring them to the sessions week in and week out getting those extra practices in at home and providing them with endless support, our industry trained Tutors who work tirelessly to provide professional level lessons to your young ones in a creative and fun way. We are a family here at TPS and we couldn’t be prouder of that fact.
Come and join us on the rest of the journey…what will be our next chapter?
Speak to you soon performers!
Written by: Head of The Performance Studios Amy Gaskell
[1] https://www.apollotechnical.com/career-change-statistics/#:~:text=years%20of%20age.-,How%20many%20jobs%20will%20the%20average%20person%20have%20in%20their,people%20have%20completely%20changed%20fields.
Written by Amy Gaskell : Singing Tutor
