2017 - PRESENT

YOUNG THEATRE MAKERS

 
 
 

Funded by London Community Fund & Walcot Foundation, Young Theatre Makers (YTM) started life as a 1 yr collaboration with 3 other organisations. Arts Bridge Charity approached Tavaziva Dance, Metta Theatre & Literacy Tree to create a consortium - with Arts Bridge at the helm - to deliver this ambitious project.

Partnering with two school cluster groups - Brixton Learning Collaborative and Windmill Cluster - we enrolled four Lambeth schools to participate:

  • Archbishop Sumner

  • Henry Fawcett

  • St Saviour’s C of E Primary School

  • Sudbourne School

225 pupils in total.

The project was divided into two sections:

  1. Weekly, KS2, in-school playwriting workshops creatively developing literacy skills by exploring creative responses to the book ‘Tar Beach’ by Faith Ringgold

  2. Half term course with masterclasses from Black Asian Minority Ethnic artists. Using the themes of Tar Beach as a stimulus - empowerment, overcoming obstacles, courage - and the skills developed during the masterclasses, the children created a play which was performed to an invited audience at the end of the course.

Feedback from the children, parents and class teachers was overwhelmingly positive.

Common themes that emerged on the impact of YTM from teacher evaluations and feedback were: -

  • Confidence building that YTM enabled for its pupil participants

  • Impact on teachers’ own practice, including how drama is a powerful means of accessing a literary text for some children:

    ‘Ways into the book…through drama’ ;

    ‘Shown just how much acting enables children to develop their ideas’

All teachers involved in the YTM project strongly agreed or agreed that their pupils benefited from taking part in the project, that working with professional artists provided new perspectives on the arts for their pupils, that YTM was successful in motivating and engaging their pupils with the arts, and that they would want their pupils to participate in another Arts Bridge project.

You can read the full report here

Due to the success of the project, we are applying for funding to continue the project and expand it to additional boroughs.

 

Funded by