Lewisham Youth Theatre is now recruiting for our annual Facilitator Training Programme, a free, hands-on training and employment opportunity for young adults aged 18–25 based in South London who are interested in youth work, creative facilitation, and making a positive impact in their community.
Trainee Facilitator's will:
- Get 12 days of FREE training across 3 weeks
- Develop practical facilitation skills, knowledge and confidence working with young people
- Gain an accredited facilitation qualification
- Receive mentoring and support with your career progression
- Get paid work experience delivering drama workshops in schools
- Join our freelancer pool and get access to ongoing paid opportunities with LYT
We're looking for people who are:
- Aged 18-25
- Living in or local to Lewisham
- Not currently in education, employment, or training
- From under represented groups in the arts (e.g. working class, global majority, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+)
- Receiving Universal credit (UC) and Job seekers allowance (JSA)
Stretch your creative muscles and split in groups, collaboratively (and friendly competitively) work on devising and adapting ideas from stimulus such as articles, published literature, sound and photography, culminating in a sharing at the end of the session. Led by Artistic Directors of StageBase, Eleanor Willis and Gabriela Chanova
Based in London; Moya Jane Studios E9 6ND
Session time from 7pm-9pm on November 4th
More sessions every Tuesday 7-9pm until the 9th of December and get all 6 sessions for £46 with the link below!
Collective Acting Studio
Polka’s Catapult Programme consists of two seed funding strands, which are designed to platform underrepresented Artists and to help bring brand new ideas and concepts to life. Both programmes are open to Artists at any stage of their career, and from any creative discipline.
The TYA sector is currently significantly underrepresented with work from artists from the Global Majority, who identify as disabled, LGBTQ+, or who come from a lower socio-economic background. There is also a real need to identify brand new stories for children – those not adapted from books, tv shows or films or western fairy tales. We are looking for artists who can address these gaps, with the very best innovative new ideas for children’s theatre.
First Steps: For brand new ideas for audiences of 0-6 years
Next Steps: For taking that first draft or second R&D to the next stage for audiences of 0-12 years
Both strands offer mentoring, training, free rehearsal space, scratch performance opportunities and tickets to Polka productions.
Do It Together (DIT) is a peer-to-peer professional development programme that enables artists to explore ideas, aesthetics and sociopolitical realities together.
In collaboration with 19 national partners, LADA invites proposals for 10 peer-to-peer professional development projects designed by artists for artists to take place across the UK between March and September 2026.
We want to hear from artists and practitioners eager to design and lead a peer-to-peer project that benefits your own practice and others’, and explores questions, ideas, tools and methodologies in a shared, process-led space.
DIT is about learning with each other – not teaching others what we already know. Your proposal should set the frame of a collective enquiry for a group of artists to explore together. The most important thing is that you consider why it is important to do the activity with other artists, how you will do it together and what becomes possible through sharing the process.
DIT celebrates the unfixed, the unruly and the unconventional. We are looking for ideas that are rooted in our new realities, and those which create portals into the unknown. This is an opportunity to do things differently, and to support each other to challenge the status quo.
Applications are now OPEN to join the 2026 cohort of SPRINGBOARD.
Springboard is our free training programme that aims to find, shape, inspire, champion and sustain the next generation of performers from underrepresented backgrounds.
This groundbreaking programme is a performance pathway into employment designed specifically to support young people aged 18-25yrs who live in West London, have zero to little formal drama training and are currently underrepresented in theatre.
Each year, 10 new trainees are enrolled in the programme, benefitting from a bursary that will support them while they take part in a wide range of development initiatives including performances, workshops, masterclasses, artist development and opportunities both on and off the stage.
Trainees receive hundreds of engagement opportunities over their attachment to the Lyric. They learn from leading industry practitioners in masterclasses led by Main House directors; Lyric Artistic Associates Nina Steiger, Tinuke Craig, Tanika Gupta, Philip McMahon and Good Teeth; and the Lyric’s Associate Director Nicholai La Barrie and Artistic Director Rachel O’Riordan.
