Centre of Excellence
The NSA is developing a new technical theatre and live music training centre in Thurrock Essex, due to open in early 2012.
The new NSA training centre will be located as part of the Royal Opera House Production Park. This will include the Royal Opera House scenery construction workshops, a number of small industry related companies, artists’ studios and public access spaces including restaurants and a walled heritage garden.
The building will house training that cannot currently be delivered nationally due to space and time restrictions in existing technical theatre training and performance spaces, and will expose learners to top level, world class technical theatre and live music professionals, companies and bands in a unique training environment. The building will foster strong professional links through expos and conferences that showcase equipment, trends and techniques and will offer continued professional development courses to bring in leading top level practitioners together with entry level and mid career level learners.
The design incorporates a large main space of 875m² with a 17m ceiling and a number of other training spaces including a CAD studio, lighting and audio-visual training studios, generic training spaces, a recording studio and band rehearsal room. These spaces will offer access to a wide variety of technical performance media and support transferability of skills and knowledge.
The concept design was submitted for funding approval in September 2009, and we have so far been awarded £5 million funding by the Learning and Skills Council and an additional £8 million from the Homes and Communities Agency. We anticipate commencing construction in January 2011 with the building open for business in early 2012, giving us the opportunity to engage in training and rehearsals of Olympic ceremonies and events.
News update
The NSA has now submitted the detailed planning application for the new headquarters and training centre. We've been working with our capital colleagues, ARUP and Gibberd Architects, with Charcoalblue offering specialist theatre consultancy. This stage represents the culmination of over a year and a half of hard work designing a concept for a building that meets industry needs, successfully raising £13m of public money, and finally submitting a completed design for planning.
We'll be preparing the site over the summer and autumn to ensure that following planning approval in September, we're ready to build early in the new year.
The building will be open for business in early 2012 in time to engage with Olympic ceremonies and training activities, bringing Olympic focus to the region and ensuring the NSA's presence in Olympic ceremonies and events.
The building's potential continues to generate strong interest from the theatre, music and further education sectors, which is allowing us to fine-tune the building's design to really reflect the rapidly growing development of specialist technical training provision across the sector.