Hi everyone,
This is going out to everyone currently on a course with us or with a booking coming up.
We’re just writing to reassure you we have been through all of the changes in legislation following the London tier 2 announcement and all of our courses and shows can safely go ahead.
Here’s some specific points on each change:
Classes and meeting people from outside household group
From the recent Government guidance there are exceptions to restrictions on where different households can gather and these exceptions include education and training, including performing arts classes. It has also been confirmed that theatres can still open with socially distanced audiences, and in fact many West End theatres much bigger than ours are still reopening this month. It does however mean that we can’t all go to the pub together after class.
We have already made our class sizes much lower than normal, and each evening we have already been splitting the class into smaller working groups of around 4-6 people to be on the safe side.
This had already been suggested by DCMS Performing Arts Guidelines back in July so we had already planned for this and have trained our teachers in it.
We have also been running socially distanced improv classes outside since July to practice, and inside since August, and improv at a distance is still really fun in fact it is more fun than ever!
We have many other safety measures in place, for a full description please go to: https://www.hooplaimpro.com/safety-in-classes
Shows and meeting people from outside household group
Theatres and comedy clubs are still able to have a larger audience, as long as they have Covid risk assessment measures in place and are able to have the audience seated in household groups with social distancing in place.
Many theatres across England, including The National Theatre and much of the West End, are still back with socially distanced shows from October.
To help this we have further reduced our audience capacity to 16 (from a pre-Covid capacity of 75+), and are able to seat people in household groups as we have flexible seating so we can adapt.
A lot of the effect on shows is actually unchanged from Performing Arts Guidelines that were published by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport back in July so we have had a lot of time to prepare and have fully trained our team.
There’s a full list of safety measures we are doing with shows at https://www.hooplaimpro.com/safety-in-shows
10pm
This is for pubs and restaurants and is not the time you have to actually be home by. Transport will still be running after 10pm. Theatre shows actually have an exception on this too and are able to run past 10pm if the shows started before 10pm.
We have moved our shows to start a bit earlier and our classes were already due to finish by 9:30pm at the latest so there is no major change there.
Additional Information
>> Hoopla’s full risk assessment
>> Government guidelines for performing arts
Many thanks,
Steve, Jessie, Angela and the rest of the Hoopla team.