Return ongoing professional training for actors to The Actors Centre

Return ongoing professional training for actors to The Actors Centre

Started
18 November 2022
Signatures: 3,812Next Goal: 5,000
53 people signed this week

Why this petition matters

Sign our letter to the Trustees of Seven Dials Playhouse. Send the message that we want our home, our community and our training back. 

“I hope we actors don’t lose the fundamental support of The Actors Centre. If it is to become a new receiving house, surely the Trustees must sustain the same level of workshop and services for actors that have earned the centre its reputation and support over many years.” Sir Mark Rylance (Actor at the Centre supporter)

To the Trustees of Seven Dials Playhouse,

We ask that you honour the original aims of The Actors Centre’s founders and reinstate the weekly actor training programme to 1A Tower Street.

Since 1978, The Actors Centre has been a home for creative collaboration, vital community and accessible, affordable training for actors. In November 2021, you made the decision to repurpose and rebrand the building and the organisation. In the process, you ripped the core out of one of our industry’s most valuable resources during one of the most challenging periods many of us have ever faced.

It has now been a year since the announcement of the repurposing was made. A year without regular actor training in 1A Tower Street, a building that The Actors Centre fundraised tirelessly to buy. In the wake of the Pandemic, massive cuts in funding to the Arts and powerful inflationary pressures, this unique resource has never been more vital.

In the last 12 months, you have not fulfilled your promise to deliver a curated workshop programme. Nor have you engaged with our call to conversation to explore reinstating regular training. This loss of crucial actor training affects accessibility and diversity in our industry, and suggests that your plans are really a worrying abandonment of the aims under which the charity was set up.  

Actor at the Centre is a creative force of over 2,000 people working in the Arts today, backed by Equity, the union that represents more than 47,000 performers and creative practitioners.

Please do your duties as Trustees, responsible for the charity's management and administration, and listen to the voices of those you claim to represent and serve the aims of The Actors Centre that means so much to so many.

We ask you again to meet with us to discuss how we can arrive at the best solution for all.

Actor at the Centre

53 people signed this week
Signatures: 3,812Next Goal: 5,000
53 people signed this week
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