Hello everyone! 

Happy new year! Here's to hoping that 2020 looks a little different to 2021. Although this year has already started out with a few whammies (another lockdown, some political uprisings to name a few), we here at Very Rascals are determinedly going to look forward. Some upcoming blogs will be addressing lessons learned in 2020 so keep an eye out for those! However, in this newsletter, we are excited to fix our eyes on the year ahead. Read on for some news from us, a new monthly surprise that we are excited about, and some general positive vibes.

We have been keeping ourselves busy over the Christmas break. Charlotte has been playing about three hours of piano a day (can you believe it?!). It's keeping her sane. Steph has binged the whole of Bridgerton, sitting under a blanket with her mum and drinking mulled wine. Charlotte assures Steph that she has also been binge watching TV shows. This made Steph feel better.

Bring on the new year!

We know it's been hard. Theatre is necessary. Now more than ever. We got this.

Much love,

Steph and Charlotte

our news

Charlotte has continued to be part of some fabulous Zoom productions. She has also been in two Radio plays, both by Distracted Rat: To my Future Self and Four Walls/One Night.

When lockdown started, Distracted Rat decided to see what creative endeavours they could bring to the online world and they settled on Radio Plays. In recording her parts, Charlotte ensconsed herself in a blanket fort which consisted of three duvets and many cushions (this was for acoustics reasons but also this sounds super fun). She got to play around with many different voices and characters and has been able to learn some new skills on the job.

Check out their radio plays HERE.

Before Christmas, Very Rascals hosted the first rehearsed reading of Relative Motion over Zoom. Relative Motion is Steph's new play and tells the story of Sam and Paul's relationship. In the play, Steph explores manipulation and power dynamics in this relationship and also throws in a little bit of physics for fun. The play was performed by two wonderful actors: Caitlin Kaur and Austin Caley. We had a few invited audience members and it was lovely to be creating stories again.

get involved

This week, we are really excited to launch our monthly series where we spotlight a creative with whom we have worked and whom we admire. This month's spotlight (and our first creative!) is Shelley Rose Kapur.

If you would like to be considered for future spotlights, please send us a message by replying to this email.

the producing corner

When we first conceived of this newsletter, we were excited to share little tidbits of producing as we discovered them. We hoped to provide insights and help into what goes into a show. For obvious reasons, the creative opportunities have been few and far between. While discussing this in our last meeting, something interesting emerged.

A question for you: what do you do to fill the creative vaccuum?

For us, we started a blog. It is still in its early stages but this simple act of creation has given us so much more than we thought it would. It is wonderful to create every week. Writing a blog, thinking about the topic, creating something out of nothing gives us an opportunity to reflect. What do we want to say? What might interest people?

It's also been so fun to now look back and see that we have generated something. We have a page of posts! It's excited to be building, even if it was not what we intended.

These blogs also give us a reason to check in with each other every week. We are building the company, thinking about where we want to go, pushing ourselves to be creative.

So here is my challenge: it can be small, it can be big. Go build your own blog. Create a podcast. Start to sing. Journal. Learn how to make origami. You don't have to be productive every second of the day but it's nice to create and it's easy to forget how it can feed your soul.

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