Jazzing It Up Project

This has been a busy week with the conclusion of one project, extensive rehearsals for another and the start of a third (more about those later). The project that concluded this week was organised and set up by Jane Ward from Hagley Catholic school. It involved a range of artists from various disciplines working with feeder primary schools and another local secondary school to produce interpretations of JAZZ. The project began with a Jazz Concert performed in each of the schools by The Aaron Diaz Quartet.

Rehearsals at Our Lady and St Kenelm School

The school I worked with, Our Lady and St Kenelm in Halesowen , began the project by letting me record their immediate responses to the concert. This was later used in conjunction with the Jazz recording to produce a sound track to their performance.

During my weeks residency the young people devised a story, created characters, made masks, recorded audio and put it all together into one structure. The ideas were very much their own interpretations. The process also involved them in negotiating within their groups and really taking ownership of the work.

The results of the project as a whole  were showcased at Hagley School last Thursday. It was a busy, but fantastic day well organised and very engaging. It was good to see what the other schools had been up to. The standard was very high and it was obvious that all  the young people had been through a very enjoyable creative process.

Celebrating Sanctuary

Here’s a couple of pictures that I manged to take at the wonderful events organised by Celebrating Sanctuary. It seems particularly important to up load these as I made a promise to two participants pictured wearing their creations.

They both visited the dramask stall several times during the day to continue to work on their masks as they wanted to make them stronger and better. The design ideas were entirely their own and the results they achieved in such a short space of time says much about their determination and artistic talent. So, as promised your masks are now on my website.

Best wishes,

Pyn

Celebrating Sanctuary

This weekend sees Celebrating Sanctuary providing entertainment, education, great music and free activities in the centre of Birmingham Victoria and Chamberlain Squares.

I am really pleased to be part of this once again and although in previous years my involvement has been through the delivery of theatre and drama based work exploring mask and identity has proved an interesting focus for my own mask making practice.

If you are in town this Saturday Celebrating Sanctuary is a not to be missed treat. Activities and entertainment start at around 11 am.

Mask Making at Cannon Hill Park BBC Water for Life Festival

Despite the torrents of rain that started the day, a day in the park in a marquee proved to be lots of fun. The new Dramask banner, of which I am rather pleased with received it’s first outing and Jen and I enjoyed mask making with all the amazing people who turned out despite the rain. A backdrop of chilled out music was provided by Marc Reck (mr elephant presents) and Mark Smallman (Custom Made).

There was lots going on that was both fun and informative and it is definatley worth checking out for another year if you missed it on  Saturday.

Free Workshops at Mr Elephant 23rd May 2009

Dramask has been working hard with the Mr Elephant Collective to programme an afternoon of FREE workshops to get the bank holiday and half term off to a creative start.

Join us at THE HARE and HOUNDS, Kings Heath this Saturday for a packed workshop programme (3pm – 7pm). There will be mask decorating, poi spinning and poodle puppets and animation happening  in the garage – these will be drop in sessions and open to all ages.

Bookable workshops will consist of : D.J, V.J, Beatbox, Loop Pedal and Drumming. If you are interested in any of those they can be booked on the day just by turning up at The Hare and Hounds – from 2pm. The V.J and D.J workshops will only be open to adults but the rest are available to children if accompanied. Please e mail me if you require further information.

Hope to see you there

Check out Mr Elephant here for information about the day and evening. There is some fantastic music lined up from 7.30.

Project X Presents Xhibition Saturday 9th May

There has been a lot of hard work going on over the last few months to put together a quite different Project X. This is going to come together this Saturday in the heart of Mosley Village with a range of art works, performances and great music.

The venues are The Church, The CDT building and The Cross upstair with performance also happening at the cross roads. It all starts at 12pm and goes on until 2pm.

I have been developing some performance work with two other artists Rahil and Lucy. This time it has been heavily influenced by the fantastic structural costumes created By Deb Mingham

To find out more about the event check out the project X website here

Romeo and Juliet CPD for Teachers

As part of the CBSO’s school concerts programme a variety of creative projects are organised. I have enjoyed being a part of these for some time and have been developing a strong working relationship with musician Jackie Tyler within this re mit.

Our most recent collaboration, developing a teachers pack exploring Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet through drama and composition is now complete and yesterday  we co facilitated a CPD day for teachers.

The staff who came from a range of primary school s in Birmingham, Telford and Northhampton really impressed us both with their enthusiasm willingness to take part in a very practical session.

The feedback was very positive and I hope to hear from the schools again as I am interested to find out how they will use the exercises, drama work and music with their classes.

A copy of the pack will be available as a resource in the near future by following this link to Jackie Tylers’ website.

Cake Theatre Lab – Masks

Since January I have been working with Ian Pringle (Cake Theatre Lab / Geese Theatre) to create a set of naive or larval masks and developing a lab workshop to explore mask work techniques.

This has given us the opportunity to  trial some new exercises and develop  existing ones. It was an exciting day particularly as we had the opportunity to see our mask creations in use. The workshop day was fully booked. Labs are now getting very popular so it is well worth checking out the website and booking well in advance.

It was a great opportunity to work with the masks with a group who as whole were very responsive and open to trying out ideas. I have certainly developed my own practice as a result and felt  that everyone involved in the lab contributed something to this development.

We hope to run another mask lab in the future. With a new set of masks. Which this time I will try to keep up more of a constant blog about the process in order to share more of this side of my work.

In the meantime here is  work in progress of the first of the naive s.

Bamboozle Training Course

I have just spent the last two days in the company of a range of skilled arts faciliatators from around the country on a training course led by Christopher Davies of Bamboozle Theatre.

I have come away with much food for thought and lots of inspiration particularly in relation to the way a group enters a space and the way language can be used to  create a safe and non judgemental space.

This, as happens everytime I take part in a training course highlights for me just how important it is to continue to train. Not only might you be given something new, shiny and exciting but it gives you the opportunity to reflect on your current practice and enter into discussion with other practitioners, to trial ideas and raise your game.

Fantastic

University of the First Age

Another fantastic Family Learning Day !

If anything there was even more happening than last year. The workshops all sounded great – I managed to catch a glimps of the circus skills which looked like lots of fun and quite a challenge and heard some of the excellent drumming.There was a lot of interesting stalls including willow work (Forest Schools), origami, clay work, how to get fit with Bangra dancing and many more that we on the Dramask mask making stall were too busy to get a chance to have a look at.

The mask making went even better than last year with lots more parents getting involved in learning the technique and my delivery being in more workshop style and it was great to see some familiar faces from Hutton Hall.

There is only one thing left and that is to thank all the people, in particular Rob Horrocks for the excellent coordination and hard work in making it happen.