Young Co's Digital Content Creators

The Young Co. at the Citizens Theatre is for people aged 18-22 who share a passion for making theatre. Participants develop skills in all aspects of theatre making such as performance, writing and production.

Many of the participants have interests and skills in other creative areas including photography, vlogging, blogging and design.

To help nurture and showcase these talents, we created a new opportunity for members of the Young Co. to become Digital Content Creators. Digital Content Creators work alongside our marketing department to create captivating content that brings productions, workshops, and storytelling to life online.

Our first Digital Content Creators, Mary Dillon and Cara Stevenson, have hit the ground running and spent the past few weeks documenting work behind the scenes of the latest Young Co. project – The Close.

Hello from Mary and Cara, Digital Content Creators for Young Co!

This year we have been working towards a sharing of work based around The Close theatre. A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to access articles from the Scottish Theatre Archive. The Scottish Theatre Archive’s role is to help preserve and promote interest in Scotland’s theatrical heritage. It forms part of the Special Collections Department of the University of Glasgow Library.

For our upcoming sharing we researched the story of The Close Theatre which opened in 1965 before burning down in the early 1970s. The Close put on shows which were radical and forward thinking – imagine Tim Curry in a corset performing in version of The Maid by Jean Genet.

To get a better understanding as to what went on at The Close we were lucky enough to take a trip to the Scottish Theatre Archive where we could handle different archival material from when The Close was open. Everything from props lists to annotated scripts.

It was impressive to see how even the smallest of receipts is kept in the archive. We found that it was the small things like this which were the most interesting to us. We could connect to the people who worked there more as it was something we all recognise and use daily.

Overall the whole experience was fantastic, getting to handle items which have such importance to a specific time in theatre history was amazing. We were able to use our thoughts and inspirations from the trip in our writing and devising while we built our script for the presentation in June.