Filskit Theatre was formed in 2009 by Katy Costigan, Victoria Dyson and Sarah Shephard who are graduates of the BA (Hons) European Theatre Arts (ETA) course at Rose Bruford.
In our latest profile of ETA graduates, the Filskit team have taken a break from their latest tour to tell us about their journey since graduating.
Filskit Theatre exists to create high quality work for young children and their families using a combination of playful performance, digital technology and music. We have created four children’s shows to date including Breaking the Ice which was commissioned by the Unicorn Theatre, London and The Feather Catcher which we are looking to tour internationally later in the year. We are currently on tour around the UK with our latest piece, Bright Sparks, for children aged 3-7 which explores the relationship between the left and right sides of the human brain.
Breaking The Ice Trailier
Over the past eight years we have been fortunate enough to perform in venues and festivals all over the UK, although some experiences were more successful than others! We began our journey as Filskit Theatre by creating work for adults which saw us performing in some interesting venues and fringe festivals around London to very small audiences. It wasn’t until a Producer came to see our work and mentioned that our highly playful and visual style would be great for children that we considered making family theatre. We decided to give it a try and managed to persuade the Unicorn Theatre and Stratford Circus Arts Centre to put their faith in our ideas and give us some rehearsal space. Thanks to these opportunities we made our first full piece, a retelling of Snow White for children aged 3-6. This piece completed a small tour of the South and enabled us to make enough contacts so that we could make and tour our next piece and so on.
Ten years after joining the ETA family our work is still heavily influenced by our time at Rose Bruford. The variety of theatre styles that you experience on ETA coupled with the opportunity to devise and direct your own work is what helped us to shape our own creative practice. During our 2nd year placement at Institute del Teatro in Barcelona we were given the freedom to explore ideas and work as professional artists. This placement played a huge part in the story of Filskit Theatre as this was where we decided to form a company and devise our own work.
ETA certainly prepared us very well for running our own company. During our time on the course we learnt to think outside the box in order to develop our own ideas which were nurtured by a team of highly experienced Tutors who were always on hand to answer any questions (and still are).
To any prospective ETA students out there we would say that this is a truly enjoyable and varied course that offers new challenges every step of the way. We met some amazing people during our course, many of whom we still work with today.
Useful Links
BA (Hons) European Theatre Arts
Filskit Theatre
Bright Sparks Tour Dates