Workshop Tutor: Kate DeRight – Wilson Stuart School

Kate DeRight is one our of Home workshop tutors, and has written about her recent work with Wilson Stuart School:

“I spent four sessions with a great group of students at Wilson Stuart School in Perry Common.  Over those sessions, we looked at all the themes of the Home project: belonging, identity and home and it was a pleasure for me to get to know each of the girls a bit.  They were certainly a bunch of characters, let me tell you!

Wilson Stuart is a special school, so the group had a wide range of learning and physical disabilities.  They preferred to work as a group (setting them tasks to complete independently was quite challenging for them), so we created several sequences of movement together.  Because the girls’ personalities were more and more revealed each week, it was really important to me that they each made individual contributions despite the comfort we all felt working as a group.

I pushed them to do a bit of work independently and I think I can speak for the girls when I say we all felt quite proud about the result.  The video below shows some of the girls performing one of our group sequences with a few of their own movements to finish.”

West Midlands Youth Dance Forum

The West Midlands Youth Dance Forum (WMYDF) is made up of young people across the region who want to develop leadership skills, see and review dance, take part in dance and act as a representative for Youth Dance in the region. The group are currently working towards their Silver Arts Award, and have excitedly been working with IDFB on Home.

The group will be creating their own workshops to deliver to youth groups across the region and in preparation the group took part in a Home workshop with Dance Leader Kate DeRight.

This is the brilliant Home contribution that they created:

They also told us what they thought of the workshop!

Open Dance Workshops

We have been busy arranging a number of open workshops around Birmingham for February and March.

Do you want to be able to create something like Ryan’s contribution?

Or perhaps a piece like Miram’s?

Do you live in Sutton Coldfield?

If so, we have the following workshops open to families who want to learn more about the project and make a contribution on the day.

Wednesday 15^th February // 11am-1pm

Brampton Hall Community Centre, Princess Alice Dr, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, B73 6RD

Friday 17^th February // 11am-1pm

Falcon Lodge Community Centre, Churchill Road, Falcon Lodge, Sutton Coldfield, B75 7LB

Friday 17^th February // 2pm-4pm:

Mere Green Community Centre, 30a Mere Green Road, Four Oaks, Sutton Coldfield, B75 5BT

These workshops are FREE and open to all.

Or, is Birmingham city centre easier to get to?

We are also hosting Home Open Days at DanceXchange which are free and open to everyone age 12 years or over.

Saturday 25 February // 11am – 5pm

Saturday 10 March // 11am – 5pm

For this workshop there are limited places available and you will need to register in advance. To register contact us on home@dancexchange.org.uk or call 0121 689 1091.

Hopefully see you at one of the events!

Lucy Kenny: Community Engagement Manager at DanceXchange

Lucy Kenny is Community Engagement Manager at DanceXchange, and she has been working with local groups to gather more contributions for Home.

Well it’s been an exciting week for Home and for me! It’s my job as Community Engagement Manager to go out and speak to community groups and organisations to let them know about DanceXchange and get them involved in our International Dance Festival Birmingham projects and this week I have met with St Basils who are a fantastic Birmingham based charity who work with young people to prevent youth homelessness.

I met with Learning, Skills & Work Advisors Manjit Dhillon and Gemma Ferati who were just as enthusiastic as I am about Home and are already planning how they can deliver not only dance workshops but also work together with their volunteers and our online resource pack to create some poetry, musical and artistic contributions of other types.  We are hoping that the young people that take part in the workshops will become some of our 1000 performers.  We also discussed a long term future of working together to make sure the young people who access their services can make the most of opportunities here at dx. It’s meetings like these that are the reason I love my job!

Here at dx we are really keen to emphasise that Home is not just about dancing but about using which ever arts medium you feel expresses your feelings on identity and belonging.  So this week I also met with Laura Yates from the Northfield Arts Forum and Jan Watts, Poet Laureate for Birmingham, and talked about how we could incorporate poetry into Home.  Laura, a poet herself, is working on the Big Brum Poem and Jan are going to get involved by sharing details of the project with their networks and recording themselves performing some poems on doormats and submitting their contributions onto our YouTube channel.

To find out more about Northfield Arts Forum follow Laura on Twitter or click here if you are interested in our current Poet Laureate.

Cat Boffy: Class Co-ordinator at DanceXchange

Cat Boffy, Class Co-ordinator at DanceXchange, has written a blog about her experience of Home so far.

I’m always looking for ways to get class participants involved in other DanceXchange activity, so when the opportunity came up for some of our classes to help pilot Home, I jumped at the chance! We were on a pretty tight schedule, but as usual our tutors were enthusiastic and ready to get started (some before I’d even finished explaining what the project was about!). With a strict timeline to stick to, the tutors had only a few sessions (or in some cases, 1 session) to work on creating short pieces that we could film and use to kick-start the project, and to show people what it’s all about.

I always enjoy going into a class and seeing what people are doing, so this gave me an excuse to get in the studios with a camera and be nosey! There was such a great atmosphere in every session, with some people coming up with ‘serious’ movement, and others, like tutor Ally Stewart who went with a more comical route!

I was really impressed with the material that the participants came up with. We had a mix of short solos as well as more collaborative pieces, and it was all created by the participants themselves (with a little help from their tutor of course). The videos we made really do show how broad the project is, and that everyone can get involved.

The other really exciting opportunity that some of our class participants had was to work with choreographer Rosie Kay on creating a short piece that they then were able to perform at the launch event for International Dance Festival Birmingham (IDFB). Getting to work with a professional choreographer like Rosie is such a treat, and the group (a mixture of ages/ability levels and gender) had a few sessions to come up with something to showcase in front of funders, sponsors, dance artists and of course the dx team! No pressure there then! In the end, the piece got great reviews from everyone at the event, and you can see the footage on the Home blog.

The thing that I love most about Home is that it gives everyone the chance to express themselves, whether they’re a dancer or not (even I got into the studio and had a bash!), and regardless of their age, gender, or ability level. If you’re reading this blog then there’s a good chance that you’re already interested in the project – why not take one more step and get involved?!

You can find out more about how to get involved in Home here!

Introduction to Andy Brunskill – Home Director

Andy Brunskill recently joined the Home team, and will direct the final performances that will take place in Birmingham City Centre during IDFB 2012.

We caught up with him on his last visit, and asked him to introduce himself, and his initial ideas about how Home would unfold:

If you’d like to take part in Home, visit IDFB.co.uk for more information!

Marie-Louise Crawley: Workshop Tutor

Marie-Louise Crawley is a Dance Artist who has been holding workshops for Home. She has written a post about two of her recent sessions:

On a Saturday afternoon last December, I had the opportunity to go out deliver two bite-sized taster workshops in Edgbaston for the Home project. These were my very first workshops for Home, so it was all rather exciting! The events at St. Francis Community Centre and Woodview Community Centre were primarily part of the EAT (Edgbaston Arts Table) project, run by this year’s two Champions for the Arts in Edgbaston, Sampad and the Birmingham Hippodrome. They very kindly let us join their event and so off I went, armed with ten doormats and an iPod, and raring to get Edgbaston dancing on the themes of home, community, identity and belonging.

I first worked with five boys aged 5-12 at St Francis Community Centre, Bartley Green, doing a street/contemporary warm-up before moving onto creative tasks on the theme of home. We had a quick mindmapping session of what home meant to them, where we came up with an enormous range of answers from “my X-box” to “where life begins” – before moving onto fun, creative tasks with the doormats themselves. It appears that the possibilities of the doormat are endless – the boys were extremely inventive and we explored how to create sound with them, how to use them as a prop in the dance, and how to travel in different ways using the mat. The lads had some excellent breakdance moves so we looked at how we could use those with the mat to create some short dance sequences with (safe!) spinning and sliding, before thinking back to what we had written on the Home mindmap and then creating short solos about home from that. Although the session was of an informal, drop-in nature and there were plenty of other activities for the youngsters to enjoy at EAT, we worked for a solid forty minutes or so, and I even managed to capture a contribution on video.

At the second venue (Woodview), I worked with five girls and one boy aged 6-12. Again this session was a drop-in session, but one of girls soon came up with a short solo that she was happy and proud to contribute to the project on video. All in all, everyone I met was very enthusiastic about the project and for me it was a lovely start to what is going to be a very exciting dance adventure this Spring.

Marie-Louise Crawley
Dance Artist

Season’s Greetings from Home

The excitement of Christmas has become muted since I was a child. But spending Christmas with my parents today, one thing I do look forward to and which makes me feel like I’m back in our family home again is decorating the tree. We will dig out old cardboard boxes full of ancient, dusty decorations, each of which has a particular set of memories attached to it.

From pieces of playschool artwork, covered in blobs of glitter glue and sparkly paper, to little wooden ice-skating figures and angels with missing wings; from the glass balls which we each painted one year, to the mischievous wooden gnomes that came from Sweden. From tinsel that must be about 25 years old, to the fairy doll that swings, lopsidedly benign, from the top of the tree – and not forgetting the all-important coloured lights that must first be untangled (no mean feat) before being draped artfully around the whole tree and switched on in the magical moment that means Christmas is just round the corner.

(You can buy this lovely doormat at John Lewis)

Although we are no longer in my childhood house, and the shrieking and romping have been replaced by sipping of wine and grown-up jokes, the ritual and the family memories that accompany this activity make me feel I’m definitely at home.

While I’m getting tangled up in tinsel and thinking about nostalgic memories of childhood, lots of other people are also going ‘home’ for Christmas. Maybe it’s the time of year, for some, when ‘home’ (or the lack of it) is the most potent. After you’ve finished the last bits of stilton, and your nerves have calmed down following Dr Who, have a think about what ‘home’ is and what it means to you – especially at Christmas time. Do you like being home for Christmas? Do you avoid it? What sort of things mean ‘home’ to you, and do they have anything to do with Christmas ‘traditions’? Let us know by submitting your contribution in any creative way. To find out how to contribute, go to the Take Part section of the IDFB website.

For a bit of inspiration, have a look at some of the dance videos on our YouTube channel; or read this poem we received yesterday from Cassiah Joski-Jethi.

If I Was A Bee

If I was a bee,
I would be flying free,
Away from harm,
Into the queen’s arms,
I would be warm and whole,
I could feel my soul
Be glowing inside,
And I would reside
Forever in this sweet nest
Where I can find rest,
A place to wish and dream,
A place where it would seem
I could do anything,
And I could sing
A glorious tune
For a glorious room,
Of kind hearts and minds,
Stripes of all the same finds,
My place and my wonder,
Where there is no fire or thunder,
Where my heart lies,
And fear dies.
I have always been here,
With them, so near,
I am home I say,
Never to fly away.

And from all of us at IDFB and DanceXchange – have a lovely holiday season, with or without Christmas, whether you’re at ‘home’ or escaping to somewhere warm!

Miranda Laurence
Project Manager // DanceXchange

Welcome to Home

This is the new blog for Home as part of International Dance Festival Birmingham 2012 (IDFB).

What to expect…

We’ll be updating regularly with details of the latest contributions, interviews and blogs from the creative team, insights into the groups we’re working with, details of workshops and open days and much more.

What is Home?

Home is a new production and flagship project from IDFB. It is a bold, inventive and ambitious project that will see 1000 people contribute music, dance, visual art, and written/spoken word on the themes of home, belonging and identity.

The project will culminate with 1000 individuals performing in the streets of Birmingham city centre between 23 April and 13 May 2012.

Here is an example of a group our associate artist, Rosie Kay, worked with for the launch of the IDFB 2012:

Do you want to get involved? Here’s how…

Contribute // Make a film, compose a piece of music, write a poem and send it in to idfb@dancexchange.org.uk with a completed contribution form available to download from the Take Part section of the IDFB website or take part in one of our workshops.

To book a workshop with a group you work with:

Workshops will be happening across the West Midlands until 16 March 2012. To make a booking or request further information, please contact us using the details below.

Perform // Take part in our public performances (23 April-13 May 2012)

Email us // idfb@dancexchange.org.uk

Call us// You can call our Project Manager on +44 (0)121 689 1091