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I’m delighted that Get A Word In Edgeways has asked me to manage and lead their Jubilee Project, ‘Tales of a Commonwealth’

Throughout June, we will be commemorating the Jubilee and exploring what it means to be part of the Commonwealth through conversation, poetry, storytelling, writing and dance.

I’m going to be part of an amazing team of female artists from India, Trinidad, South Africa, Scotland and England coming together to create a new blended performance; hold international conversations, workshops and performances with Shropshire children and take poetry to the streets of Much Wenlock.

Our artists are: Arupa Lahiry, Shivanee N. Ramlochan, Philippa Namutebi Kabali-Kagwa, Ailsa Dixon, Simone Gilliatt, Kate Innes and Jean Atkin

Tales of a Commonwealth Schools Project

Three primary schools will take part in zoom sessions with artists live from Trinidad, India and South Africa.  The children will find out about cultures in different parts of the Commonwealth, hearing and seeing stories, songs, poetry and dance.  They will literally  open windows to the world as the artists share their views out of the window with the children and answer their questions.

Each class will have a day working in person with a local wordsmith to create their responses to meeting the Commonwealth artists – we look forward to sharing their poems, stories and performances with you here!

Tales of a Commonwealth new blended performance

Six women artists from the Commonwealth come together from India, Trinidad, South Africa, Uganda, Scotland and England – to create one blended performance.

The piece will explore the cultures of our homelands; what the Commonwealth means to us and how the Queen has influenced us.

The Queen’s Jubilee is a wonderful opportunity to explore the idea and experience of a female figurehead.  All our artists are women and we will talk about female perspectives over the past 70 years and our own experiences as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, grandmothers and working women

Throughout June we will be meeting to share our experiences, artforms and the importance of the Queen’s Jubilee and the Commonwealth.  In these current times of reflection on our shared history, the Commonwealth is a complex and often difficult topic. Together we will examine the aims and reality of the Commonwealth and look to a future where we examine ways of redistributing money and power – making it a genuine commonwealth, where we share our wealth, knowledge and advantage in common. 

What will the final performance be?  We don’t know yet!  But six women and six artforms will unite in a unique blended event – conversations about our lives and realities weaving in and out with more traditional performance.  

Have a look at http://www.getawordinedgeways.co.uk and subscribe to the newsletter on the website, to make sure you stay up to date with all the individual events

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Wow – what a World Storytelling Day that was!

World Storytelling Day has been going in a truly International way since about 2004 and I have usually celebrated it by telling stories from around the world in a school.  This has been a great way to celebrate different countries, cultures and storytelling with young people and raise awareness of storytelling.  However, this year was entirely different!  All over the world people have cancelled gatherings and are maintaining social distancing. While that sounds like it should have been the end of this year’s World Storytelling Day, it led to the most vibrant celebration of our global storytelling community I’ve yet encountered! Continue reading “World Storytelling Day 2020”

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I am sat on a rather beaten up train, each person sat near me staring into phones, tablets and laptops, plugged into the digital world.  I’m on my way home from a Digital Skills for Storytellers Sharing Day put on by Beyond the Border in Cardiff.  Digital skills and digital storytelling is a fiery topic in the storytelling world. Some storytellers dig their heels in and have as little to do with technology as possible, eschewing mobile phones and televisions; resisting the threat of any dilution of the intimate connection of live storytelling. Most have ventured as far as maintaining a website and FaceBook page.  Some intrepid few are launching themselves into the world of live streaming, Facebook events and Skype storytelling clubs.  Personally, I think it is almost impossible to put on any event without interacting online… and as I try to reduce the plastic in my life, replacing the process of laminating posters and driving to various remote notice boards with facebook events seems like the ethical way to go (even though I know there are moral issues with Facebook!).  But that barely brushes the edge of using digital tools.  The possibilities opened by technology are huge!  While I find the prospect daunting – the time eaten by technology and the array of constant new skills demanded, I’m determined that if I’m going to enter this brave new world, there’s no point unless I embrace it wholeheartedly, play with it and make use of the myriad opportunities rather than dabbling in the shallow (on every level) waters. Continue reading “Digitial Skills for Storytellers Sharing Day”

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I’ve been asked by artist Anne Marie Lagram to respond to her exciting, thought-provoking new exhibition, developed working with the story of Mitchell’s Fold and the witch who is buried there.  It’s fantastic challenge to respond to the artwork through story, I’ve really been enjoying watching the pieces develop and questioning my own assumptions about the story.

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The dream team are getting back together!  I’m delighted I’m going to be working with fabulous storyteller Fiona Collins again.  We have been appointed to create a storytelling garden with Year 1 pupils at Bryn Collen School in Llangollen.

I am fascinated by early years literacy.  Writing is an extraordinarily complex skill.    I have been working more and more in this area, using play, physicality and outdoor spaces to isolate and hone different component skills and processes.  This project gives us the opportunity to implement much of what I have already learned, to learn far more and to have lots of days playing and creating with a group of creative, mischevious, fun children!

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During the spring term Fiona Collins and I mentored a group of year 9/10 students at Selly Park Technology College preparing them for their Bronze Arts Award.  Over a period of weeks the students explored a variety of storytelling techniques and organised a performance of stories and riddles within school.  The students all came to the Young Storyteller of the Year Competition on 13th March in Birmingham and either performed in the competition or assisted the judges and took part in the deliberation process.  The whole day was brilliant – an excellent opportunity to hear professional storytellers, perform stories in a professional theatres and meet other young people interested in storytelling.  All our students have now successfully acheived their Bronze Arts Award.

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This project took place at the Bridge School with a core group of 14-18 year old students with moderate to severe learning difficulties.  The aim was to create and deliver a project to support students on a creative journey.  One week was used to introduce us as artists and our artforms, to introduce the idea of art as a way to explore and question as well as self-expression, to learn and experiment with a variety of artforms and skills, all through the key media of storytelling and visual art.  A second week focused on our students giving a storytelling performance developed during the first week to groups of primary school children (with a variety of special needs) and mentoring the primary school children on a one to one basis to pass on some of the visual art techniques learned.

This project was a wonderful success according to artists, staff and pupils.  As our key contact, Mandy James, Business and Enterprise Co-ordinator put it:

‘The journey our pupils went on through this project was fantastic.  They were provided with strategies to develop confidence, develop their communication skills and become teachers themselves. These young people will remember this project for a long time.’

For more details about this project please click here:

 

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 Newport is a town layered with story and memory.  The canal remembers busier days crowded with boatmen, Chocolate Charlie bringing pocketfuls of sweets back from Cadburys for the local children and harsh winters of frozen barges. Three fish swim on gates, walls and flags, heading towards the King, leaving prosperity in their wake.  You may still catch a glipse in a window of Elizabeth Parker in her wedding dress, waiting all her life and beyond for her fiancee.  When night falls, Madam Pigott haunts the roads and lanes watchful of her chance to take revenge on any young men out alone.

Throughout September and October I worked with dancer Rose Gordon and choreographer Bettina Strickler on a fantastic ‘Find Your Talent’ and DanceXchange collaboration to celebrate the history, folklore and people of Newport. 

 We collaborated with several schools and community groups in Newport to gather, combine, retell and celebrate stories of Newport.  The project culminated in a fantastic Hallowe’en performances with two marvellous young storytelling tour guides leading audiences around the Madam Piggott exhibition and a school haunted by ghostly dancers.

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This project was a collaboration between DanceXchange, Telford and Wrekin Libraries, and High Ercall and Crudgington Primary Schools.  I worked with dancers Emma Burns and Laura Dredger using Shropshire myths and legends to inspire dance with KS2 children. 

Working with dance was a new and inspiring process for me.  Our sessions were full of experimentation, using rhythms and patterns of words to evoke different atmospheres and tempos that were then interpreted through movement. 

The project culminated in a performance at Charlton Secondary School where students from both schools shared their work with each other and a very big and supportive audience!

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This project was designed to enhance a sense of community in Craven Arms and to encourage participants to share their ideas for the future of their area. 

I teamed up with Fiona Collins to work with KS2 children interviewing local elders about their memories, hopes and fears for the community with the aid of ‘fantastic faces’: faces made from vegetables with paper features on which were scribed local sights, sounds, smells, tastes and memories.  The sessions were non-threatening, empowering and filled with laughter.  Through preparatory sessions with both the schools and groups of elderly people we were able to match children with interviewees so that all had a positive experience.  Leaving the traditional clipboard of questions behind led to more active conversations, while using writing in an unusual and interesting context led to the children gaining new understanding and increased confidence in using the medium, as well as some wonderful cross-generational communication.

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Project Leaders: Amy Douglas and Michelle O’Connor (visual artist and mosaicist)

Our project was to create a nine metre square wall mural with the The Bridge School at their old site to welcome them to their new school as part of the Hadley Learning Community.

We worked with14 – 17 year old students with a wide range of physical and educational special needs for a week. The theme chosen by the school was the story of the Wrekin Giant.  This story was told every morning with the aid of a specially made storysack, the students telling more and more of the story each time.  Each day focused on a different aspect of the story and included a large number of wide-ranging activities to keep attention, enthusiasm and to allow opportunity for all children to shine.

For example, one day focused on water.  I told a local flood story, and we re-created the flood using lengths of shimmering blue and green material. We then talked about different types of water – puddles, rain, streams, rivers, lakes.  With the students inside we threw buckets of water at the window so they could watch the shapes the water made.  We went outside and played with trays of water – sketching the shapes the water made when it had a stone dropped in.  We added oils to water and made reflective imprints by laying paper on the top. Using wire hoops we made large bubbles and drew the shapes of them.  We headed off on a walk to a local pool and looked at all the plants growing around the water and the wildlife in and around the pool. The sketches produced were taken the next day to Jackfield tile museum and used for ideas as our stundents painted tiles which were fired and used in the Welcome Wall. 

This was an exciting, successful project helped greatly by the enthusiasm of all the teachers and support staff at the Bridge.  The staff led by example, supported us in our ideas and extended the project by follow on work after we had gone.

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This was a reminiscence residency lasting nine months, which celebrated the lives and memories of people living around the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.  We included local primary schools at all stages of the process, using our work to inspire the children and empower them to influence the rest of the project.  Throughout the project we built up a memory box, which slowly filled with more and more objects, each associated with at least one story.  We used the following activities with the children, with great success:

Story detectives: children listened to stories from the memory box and played conversational games.  We introduced them to methods of interview technique.  Children interviewed each other and members of their families.  They brought stories back into class and added new objects to the memory box.

Storyseeds: children chose stories from a selection told from the memory box and we used these as seeds to create a ‘play in a day’: performances of storytelling, dance, drama and music for children, parents, governors and community members at the end of the day.

Storywalks: we took various community groups including the Country Park Junior Rangers Club on walks around the area, telling stories gathered from the community in sites associated with the stories.

‘Pontcysyllte Memories’: the project concluded in a book of reminiscences published by Tempus Publishing.   We held a grand book launch next to the aqueduct with the mayor of Wrexham presenting each contributor with a copy of the book.  The youngest contributor to the book was nine years old.  As part of the celebration, children told stories with the aid of the memory box to audiences including the mayor.

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