About halfway along the lengthy gravel driveway leading up to Tring Park School, first-time visitors experience something. You see ballet dancers performing behind a floor-to-ceiling window through the trees, and you start to get the impression that this place, whatever it is, doesn’t exactly adhere to the norms of a typical school. You never get rid of that feeling.
Built around a mansion created by Sir Christopher Wren in 1685, Tring Park School for the Performing Arts is situated on a sixteen-acre estate in Hertfordshire, England. Rolling lawns, oak staircases, and ceiling friezes are examples of architecture that leaves you wondering how anyone can focus on anything. However, the pupils here manage to do so. They oversee A-levels. They oversee the auditions. The trick is probably more difficult because they handle both at once.
The school offers vocational training in dance, acting, musical theater, or commercial music in addition to a comprehensive academic curriculum for students ages 7 to 19. It was first established in 1939 as the Cone-Ripman School, a union of two dance schools in London that had been forced to relocate due to World War II. In 1945, it moved into the Rothschild family’s abandoned mansion. That history has a subtle poetic quality. A school founded by educators who persisted in teaching during a war is now turning out performers whose careers are nearly as uncertain.
To be honest, the list of alumni is impressive. Daisy Ridley, Lily James. Newton, Thandiwe. Findlay, Jessica Brown. Henderson, Ella. These are names that can be found on movie posters and festival stages all over the world; they are not obscure success stories. It’s difficult not to wonder what precisely is going on in those rehearsal rooms that isn’t happening elsewhere when you look at that list.
All potential students, with the exception of those joining the Prep, must audition; about one in seven applicants are accepted. The school has about 355 students enrolled at any given time, making it a small community by most standards, which likely accounts for the intensity of what is produced here. In a school this size, hiding is not an option. You either perform or you don’t make it very long.
The annual cost for full boarders is close to £49,500, which is a substantial amount. However, Tring Park is one of just eight schools in the nation to receive Music and Dance Scheme Awards, which are government-funded scholarships intended to provide gifted students from all backgrounds with access to top-notch instruction. Additionally, the school offers its own talent-based scholarships during auditions. Although Tring Park’s stated intent seems sincere, it is still unclear whether those pathways are truly wide enough in the context of performing arts education as a whole.
In front of the camera, the mansion itself has had an odd career. Filming for The Avengers took place there. The Judy Garland biopic did the same. The Flash utilized Wayne Manor’s staircase. The lobby was transformed into a fictional Manhattan society building for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Some students might pass places they’ve seen in movies without realizing how strange that is. Or maybe they fully register it, and that’s the whole point.
Tring Park appears to have a better understanding than most that someone who is trained as a performer but not as a thinker will become brittle. When you consider the results, the school’s claim to be “the UK’s leading performing arts and academic school” seems like marketing. Then it begins to sound like a plausible assertion.
