In short, Tenderfoot is The Civic Theatre, Tallaght’s apprentice theatre programme for secondary school students. Each year, Tenderfoot offers fifty Transition Year students from schools in South Dublin this once in a lifetime opportunity.
The process began way back last September when Veronica the programme director visited our school to host auditions. Thankfully a few weeks later, me and five others were told the good news that we got picked. We then went for two induction days in October to meet everybody. Everyone was so lovely and the atmosphere was indescribable. This left me super excited for the 3 blocked weeks starting in January 2020.
January could not have come any sooner. We got straight to work and began devising and getting casted into different plays. I thankfully got casted into the school play called ‘’I’m not ok’’ and played the character of Adrian. I loved my character. Our mentors allowed us all to really dig deep into who our characters were and what is their purpose and meaning. Of course tenderfoot is not all about the acting. The 50 students involved all get split into different groups which range from actors, to stage management, to costume, to lighting, the list goes on. We all pull together as one unit in the last week to put the show together. Each day we all got the chance to play games together which was on one my highlights. And furthermore the actors got to work closer again doing vocal exercises and games. And then of course for the remainder of the session we all split into our groups to work with our mentor. Especially in the last week or two us actors worked with all the different sub groups i.e. sound, costume which was a very interesting dynamic. We all worked on different elements of our piece. There were a total of 3 short plays, 1 musical, and one short film on the shows programme. Each of the plays required a costume team and sound team hence why we worked with them.
In total we had 4 public performances. I enjoyed each and every one of them. It was great to show our schools, that came on the first two performances, all the work we had put into tenderfoot in the last three weeks.
I simply cannot describe in words of what the experience has done for me. It was so eye opening and such a humble experience all round. I met such amazing people that I keep in close contact with still. I miss tenderfoot so much. It became my life for just over 3 weeks and it really gave me a taste of what being a professional actor is really like. I credit all of the team for doing a superb job. I would strongly suggest that next year’s Ty’s get involved in this amazing programme that is also entirely free of charge which is also another great bonus.
All the best,
Jake Bushe