After my first year at GSA, I was on the look out for opportunities around GSA to start getting my work up on its feet. There were Spoken Word and Choreography competitions, and a scratch season exclusively for BA Actors, but there was not yet an opportunity for emerging creative artists to trial original material in front of a live audience and receive feedback from both staff and students. A similar kind of event had run pre-Covid, but had not been brought back, so it was only right that the brand new course at GSA be the ones to make it happen!

​

So ultimately, we set out to create the space that I'd been hoping for.

​

With absolutely no knowledge or experience of organising or running events, I began by pitching the idea for GSA Labs to the head of BA Applied and Contemporary Theatre, before going on to assemble a team of Theatre Production students and meeting with the head of Technical Theatre. After completing all the necessary risk assessment bits and bobs, we met with the newly appointed head of GSA and then we got into the juicy part: sending out the open-call to students from any course, year and qualification who might be interested in trialling any kind of original creative art that fits the studio space.

​

The key here being that Labs is not a competition, just a safe space for students to play, experiment and make mistakes. Whether you've got a scene from a play you’re writing, a monologue, a short story, spoken word or poetry, an original song or musical composition, a short film, movement or dance piece, essentially, our proposal is 'You bring the material and we'll bring you a tech team and an audience.'