Jon Croose - Artistic
Director
Jon has a 12-year professional
background in theatre as a writer, actor, musician, workshop leader,
teacher of Drama, director and stage manager.
He has worked with a range of
companies including English Touring Theatre, Oddbodies, Tiebreak, Vanland,
Wimbledon
Theatre, Glastonbury Festival and the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe and has toured the USA with the Hampstead
Players, one of America’s largest touring theatres for
children.
Jon has
directed four Youth Drama festivals in the last five years in the South
West, each involving around 20 short pieces by more than 100 young
people at a time. He has collaborated closely with other professional
musicians and choreographers on youth performances including
Sondheim’s Company, The Beggar’s Opera at Weston
Playhouse, and Macbeth at Norwich Castle.
As an
actor he has toured extensively in children’s theatre and TIE
and performed in Pinter’s The Lover and The Dumb Waiter
(Bristol) Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens and Fall For Me (Edinburgh)
Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Norwich)
As a
writer, Jon has produced professional stage adaptations of The Lion the
Witch and the Wardrobe, The Bacchae, Dorothy on the Road to Oz, A
Christmas Carol and Robin Hood. He has also written Let’s
Talk About Sex, a sex education play, and Neither Here Nor There, a
promenade show for teenagers highlighting the experiences of refugees
and asylum seekers.
In 2004
Jon was awarded an MA in Cultural Performance at Bristol University
Drama Department in association with Welfare State International.
During the MA, Jon collaborated with the Eden Project performance
company on a research placement into the role of performance as part of
ecology and developed work with Welfare State International in
carnival, lantern making, music and performance installations on a
range of themes.
These included When Will The Sleepers
Awaken…? a 1960s caravan transformed into the
world’s smallest interactive, Situationist mobile art
gallery, recently featured in The Guardian, and a Chinese Dragon Dance
and Dragon Boat ceremony directed by Taiwanese artist Pablo Kiang for
Ulverston Carnival in memory of the Chinese Cocklepickers drowned in
Morecombe Bay.
Following
the MA in September 2005, Jon set up a community arts collective -
Means of Production - which aims to produce socially engaged
participatory arts projects involving communities of all types.
Means of
Production was set up with a focus on teaching creative skills which
can be passed on in communities. MOP work aims to encourage practical
engagement with the arts by people of all ages and backgrounds, often
linked to a calendar of festivity. Many MOP projects seek to draw out
or re-imagine community histories or locations through site-specific
festival work or the creation of contemporary myths.
Jon
recently directed the Compton and Marldon Lantern Festival and
collaborated with Totnes Young People’s Theatre as
co-director of David Farr’s adaptation of The Odyssey. He
recently wrote and directed two youth theatre pieces for a
site-specific event with TYPT and English Heritage at Totnes Castle and
was writer in residence for Devon Youth Theatre’s 2006 Summer
School performance Snakes and Ladders, performed by the
county’s leading young actors. Most recently he has been
collaborating with Oddbodies Theatre Co as part of the Soup Kitchen
multi-disciplinary R&D project, funded by the Arts Council.
In the
West End, Jon is continuing his involvement as composer of Saucy Jack
and the Space Vixens, a musical which recently enjoyed its second
London run starring Faye Tozer, formerly of the pop group Steps, and
with choreography by Bruno Tonioli of Strictly Come Dancing.
Jon is a
regular performer on guitar at acoustic sessions in Bristol and the
South West, has 20 years’ international busking experience
and writes and performs contemporary poetry.
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