From the Dancer: Effie-Mae

Effie-Mae is one of our young dancers here at artsNK. Currently she is undertaking Arts Award and as part of the award, Effie Mae has written a number of reviews about shows she has been to watch and classes/workshops she has taken part in.

So why did Effie-Mae want to get involved in Arts Award?

"I am doing the Arts Award because I enjoy coming to the different dance classes at NK and this is a good opportunity for me to learn new things about dance. I can also use the Arts Awards on my CV later on to help me get a place at college or university."

Here Effie-Mae talks about her experience watching The Imagination Museum by Katie Green, which took place at the Terry O' Toole Theatre in November.


On the 7^th of November 2013 I went to see a dance show named The Imagination Museum at the Terry O’Toole Theatre. It was a contemporary dance performance – the art forms that were involved were dance and drama. I hadn’t really seen anything like it before, but I have seen a contemporary performance recently but they weren’t the same at all. This was because the Imagination Museum was interactive and included a lot of audience participation. After the show I spoke to Katie Green who directed and choreographed the piece she explained that usually the show is performed in museums and this was the first time it has been shown in a theatre.

The performers were very funny and got the audience involved all the time such as: at the start when we walked in Harriet (one of the performers) gave me and my friend Annie-Mae a sticker and said you are mammoth one and you are mammoth two. We felt a bit scared that we might have to go on stage in front of everyone when we were given the sticker. We didn’t know why we had the stickers but we soon found out!

As we went into the auditorium to take our seats our seats at the back one of the performers, who was called Henry, called us over to help set up the performance.  We had to move some boxes over to the other side of the stage. Later on in the performance Henry said that the boxes needed to be on the other side of the stage ready to be collected.  He made the audience pass the boxes from one side of the stage to the other, passing them through the audience but once the boxes had been passed all the way through the audience he realised these boxes had just been delivered and he made us pass them all the way back again.  The audience groaned a little as they passed them back again but it also made us laugh because he had got it wrong.

At the very start of the show Mildred called out that all of the mammoths had to hide behind their seats! We did this giggling as it made us laugh; once we had hidden we were allowed to sit back down again. Mildred was another dancer in the performance and she liked everything squeaky clean she made Henry and Harriet tidy everything up. Whilst they were cleaning up Mildred came up to me and Annie-Mae and started cleaning our shoulders. This made me feel happy that she was interacting with us. Throughout the whole performance the dancers were really interacting with the audience which I enjoyed and liked because it made me feel part of the show. I didn’t dislike any part of the performance because I thought that it was all really creative and well performed. It was a bit disappointing because there was hardly anyone in the audience and it was such a great performance! I would definitely recommend this because I think people will enjoy watching it. At one point we had people crawling along the bottom of our legs, this is something which would normally happen during a show and it made us laugh.

I learnt from the show that with a short amount of time you can still create a huge successful performance.  Katie Green was talking to Amy at the end of the performance saying that loads of people dropped out, this meant she had to change the whole performance at short notice.  I still think she did a great job, it was a fun evening and I enjoyed seeing something different.
To read more of Effie-Mae's reviews click here.