Creative Futures week opening March 2012 ( Pt 1 of 12 )

Well here we are - another year  has gone and Futures Week is upon us again. Monday at 10 a.m. and we all gathered into the hall for a morning of compulsory attendance! Statistics in a recent survey were spoken about and what jobs creative skills gaps there are  for Graduates and what employers are looking for  - such as creative practise skills in areas such as Advertising, Design, Radio and Music  - to name a few. The importance of a good  core education in your discipline area is essential.
He pointed out the 3 important core elements that will be covered over  Futures Week. These are 1) Employ-ability 2) Entrepreneurship 3) Professional Development. Futures week gives us an insight into the reality of working in industry  and to make us more employable. He is quoted as saying that "  At the end of the day that's our job - to make you employable and to give us various opportunities to develop professionally" .
He then went on to talk about the rapidness in the advances in Technology that surround us. The importance of how it effects us in what we do and this led to a quotation from the many song lyrics that are around  and his chosen one was from a Pink Floyd song.
 " And one day you find 10 years have got behind you,
  No one told you when to run, 
  You missed the starting gun".
This was interpreted as the starting gun being our time at Glyndwr as our opportunity and with our time grasp everything and make the most of it  - especially the Futures week.
             
The full lyrics to the song are..


Time (Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour)


Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.


Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.


So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.


Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to nought or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.




Good lyrics to sum up how time and life can be perceived when you are young.








We were then handed over to Shakespearean Professor , Vice Chancellor Professor Michael Scott  because  Morris Cockeral was off sick.

We were firstly given an overlook of Shakespeare's life and he was  portrayed as one of the most exceptional businessmen that Britain had ever seen. An entrepreneur, shareholder,  landowner and moneylender he was also regarded and seen by some in the same way as a pimp! His place of work was sometimes looked upon as a brothel and if he hadn't have had a licence for his business he would have been seen as an illegal vagabond. Shakespeare also had a friend that was imprisoned who worked in the same profession as he did. This was because of the creative work he had done which led to a sentence of him having his nose split and strangely enough this was also the sentence that a convicted prostitute had at the time! 400 years after Shakespeare's death  people are still  making millions of pounds from his work and the connections to his name.

He then went on to give us an insight into his father's life as there are some areas of Shakespeare's life  we do not know about such as how we became such a phenomenon in the world. This then  led  us into hearing about a young Shakespeare at 10 years old when he lived in Stratford and in the time of Queen Elizabeth the First .His first encounter with  James Burbage would become a real eye-opener for an impressionable William Shakespeare. Years later Shakespeare went to London to see where money was made but by then, James Burbage had already in 1576 coined the term "Theatre" for his business.

 In the 1590's James Burbage had started looking for new plays and by this time a much older Shakespeare  had started to steal other people's plays. This was done by watching other people's plays and them he rewrote them and this is where his questionable reputation started. In 1596 two tragedies hit Shakespeare. One is that  of his son Hamlet's death  and the second is the death of James Burbage

Overall I enjoyed being enlightened by this insight into Shakespeare, the man and the myth were separated. I do now see William Shakespeare in a different light and in a strange way I think that if Shakespeare hadn't  have plagiarised the work of others plays then it wouldn't have enhanced his own writing and many plays would have been lost in time maybe forever. Like him or loathe him maybe we can extract some parts of his life and adapt them into ours, Obviously not the negative but the positive drive.