Creative Arts Programme - SPRING CHICKENS
Big Telly Theatre Company is seeking to recruit creative professionals interested in working on Spring Chickens Two, the next stage of its work with older people.
Spring Chickens One was about strengthening voices.
Spring Chickens Two is about imagining solutions and building capacity.
Imagining Solutions uses the creative arts for older people to imagine a perfect world, a unique opportunity to envision and explore ways in which society should better serve the older generation. Building capacity is about implementing practical strategies for older people, to play a more active role within their communities.
Older people are frequently valued because of their memories rather their contribution to the present and the future. This makes them victims of a type of benevolent prejudice which limits their potential as contributors to the future of society and how it should be shaped so they can live in it peacefully. Compounded by the impact of age discrimination, poverty and isolation, the need to empower older people as catalysts of change is both urgent and compelling.
We believe that there is a real opportunity for the arts to facilitate the imagining of solutions to issues faced by older people. While ‘issue-based theatre’ articulates problems, we are keen to use imaginative techniques as a methodology to offer new paradigms of thinking about the lived experience.
Big Telly is now recruiting creative professionals to work with us on the first stage of Spring Chickens Two, the visionary one, where participants dream a little, and invent their very own Utopian world. This stage of the project gets to the heart of what matters to older people. We want participants to develop expressive confidence, to use surreal, poetic inventive approaches to develop lateral thinking and to use a broad range of theatrical techniques to articulate their vision. We are looking for creative facilitators keen to explore this theme through any theatre Artform – workshops could be based on drama, creative writing, movement, improvisation, music, puppetry, film, clowning.... Facilitators can commit to a one-off workshop, or a series of workshops with one group. Material generated from this stage of the process will be collected and then used as the basis of the following projects, Ten Spring Chickens Shows, The guerrilla theatre tour, with young people and by a consultant who will translate these Utopian visions into policy.
“The Spring Chickens Programme has been a very successful one. It has managed to achieve two quite distinct objectives, on the one hand bringing interest and quality to the lives of older people, particularly isolated older people, and on the other, raising awareness about society’s often misguided perceptions about older people, and their role.” Dec 2009: External Evaluation Report, Spring Chickens Programme ’07 – ’09.
Applications from facilitators with experience of working in the creative arts with older people, and facilitators that don’t have the experience of working with older people but would welcome the opportunity to shadow facilitators that do, are both welcome.
To apply, please e-mail a letter of interest outlining your experience and interest in this project, along with a 2 page CV.
Should you have any other queries, please contact the project manager on 028 7083 1782 or e-mail springchickens@big-telly.com
Spring Chickens Two Programme
Theme One: Imagining Solutions
The basis of this programme is to use the creative arts to make it possible for older people to imagine a perfect world, a unique opportunity to envision and explore ways in which society should better serve the older generation. The material generated through this process is then used in four ways: -
1. Spring Chickens – Ten Shows
This material forms the basis of ten new Spring Chickens shows performed over the five days of Age Awareness Week, two shows each night, one taking place in a major venue and a smaller scale one ‘on location’ which is web streamed live and broadcast as part of the venue-based show.
2. Guerilla Theatre
We use the material as a basis to produce a series of guerrilla style theatre events performed by professional actors and designed to provoke debate within schools and the wider community.
3. Policy Recommendations
We work with a consultant on the translation of these Utopian visions into policy recommendations, which will then be presented to policy makers within the public sector.
4. One Hundred Premieres
We commission a professional playwright to create a play to be performed simultaneously by 100 casts of young people in to their communities, in schools, youth clubs and community centres. The play will raise awareness regarding the rights of older people and propose levels of active engagement and direct action young people can take to improve their own communities.
Theme Two: Capacity-building and developing infrastructure for community cohesion
This strand is made up of workshops which build the confidence of older people, and projects which make it possible for them to play a more active role in their communities.
1. Strengthening Voices
A series of skills-based workshops, mentoring and training programme designed to respond to the individual needs and levels of interest of participants in each area. This workshop programme has three distinctive areas, developing skills base for older people through workshops, developing skills of artists through mentoring with experienced arts facilitators and developing guidelines for those who work will older people giving them the skills as to how to engage with the creative arts.
2. Golden Gangs
A professional Drama Facilitator uses theatre skills to train older people to become volunteer facilitators in after schools clubs and/or as part of specific school projects.
3. Cultural Envoys
Young people will act as cultural envoys to immobile older people by relating a cultural event which the older person has asked them to attend on their behalf.
4. Spring Chickens Take Off!
The company aims to gradually withdraw the involvement of professional practitioners in each production, in order to provide a smaller amount of support to more groups keen to develop their own performances as part of Age Awareness Week 2011. We aim for twenty five local productions to take place, each of which will happen in a community venue for a local audience. The company will provide one director/mentor per five shows, and also work with groups in advance of these shows to identify funding opportunities to develop their work.
5. Inter-generational Performance Workshops
Inter-generational workshops based on touring productions featuring extracts from each show, taking place in residential homes/sheltered accommodation. These are an excellent opportunity to increase links between older people and younger people, and to make it possible for older people to continue a relationship with professional arts community. The workshops encourage both groups to develop critical perspective and make links with schools on how to create a practical and sustainable programme of citizenship initiatives.
