A New Future for Trestle Arts Base

For over thirty years, Trestle has developed masked storytelling theatre, unmasked physical theatre, education and training programmes and community arts projects and in the last year alone, engaged over 30,000 people in the Arts.

Earlier this year, when the government made its cuts in culture, Trestle lost its future funding, had to hone to its strengths and decide how to cut back public output for the time being. One of the major downsides to the funding cut by the Arts Council is that sadly Trestle will be unable to run Trestle Arts Base in St Albans at its current capacity, which over the past decade has inspired all ages at local and international levels. 

From September 2011 Trestle Arts Base will be open to the public on the following days;
Mondays 4pm – 9pm
Tuesdays & Wednesdays 9.30am – 5.30pm
Saturdays 10am – 3.30pm

The Gallery Café will be open, but scaled down to a minimal service of hot and cold drinks and cold snacks. We are looking forward to welcoming back many of our community classes on the days that we are open.

StoryTent and Youth Theatre programmes
Determined to not let down our 70 strong dedicated StoryTent and Youth Theatre members and to keep supporting young people’s creativity across the District, we have joined forces with our professional storyteller Kathryn Holt and local professional theatre company Tip of the Iceberg. Through these partnerships, Trestle will re-launch StoryTent and the Youth Theatre to provide sessions that bring together theatre and performance skills in a fun and nurturing environment, available to all children and young people of any ability.

StoryTent will re-launch on Wednesday 14 September

The youth theatre will re-launch on Monday 12 September with a free taster session for each age group.

4-5pm 5-7yrs
5-6.30pm 8-12yrs
6.30-9pm 13-18yrs

Tip of the Iceberg has a wealth of experience delivering creative performance, workshops and training. Their work has taken them from performing in local schools to thousands of students, including Verulam, Beaumont, St Albans Boys and the High school, to Prince Charles’ Garden at Clarence House with High Speed Theatre for Eurostar. Tip of the Iceberg and Trestle share the ethos to Involve, Inform and Inspire. We will continue to develop new ways of working with professionals and emerging artists to produce and show performance work. We are delighted to be working in partnership with the St Albans City and District Council to develop an exciting programme of professional work at Trestle Arts Base.

Emily Gray, Artistic Director said, “We are determined to keep Trestle Arts Base alive as it is such a well loved venue. We need people in the District to come and take part in our activities and see the performances and in return we will give all we can to make this a culturally alive and exciting place to live.”

We ask you to visit Trestle’s website and social networking pages and use them as a place to explore ideas, experiences, new ways of making and watching work.
- Trestle Facebook: www.facebook.com/TrestleTheatre
- Trestle Twitter: www.twitter.com/trestletheatre

The Company’s new touring show, The Man with the Luggage, previews at Trestle Arts Base on the 21 and 22 of September before it heads out on National Tour; beyond that, we will not have the resources to make and tour two new productions a year, but will instead concentrate on collaborations across cultures and art forms. Forth coming projects include Unicorn’s Indian Snow Queen, www.unicorntheatre.com/snowqueen (winter 2011) and Increpación Danza’s www.increpacion.com version of The Birthday of the Infanta (in Spain, spring 2012) – of course our efforts to make new work will never disappear.