Project Four: The Broken Bird part 1

June 7, 2016

Early in 2016 The Arts Excite secured a contract to deliver in partnership with an Oxfordshire provider, an Arts Award project for children with disabilities. The partner organisation we teamed up with is Parasol Project.

One of the things that attracted us to Parasol project was their ethos on inclusiveness, and how their provision and activities are designed to engage both disabled and non-disabled children and young people at the same time.

Parasol had recently conducted a survey with the children that access their holiday clubs and discovered that many of them were excited about puppetry and creating their own stories, so we recruited Kerstin Friedrichs a local artists who could teach the children how to make puppets and support them in developing a story they could perform to parents and friends.

We developed our project so that we would begin our delivery in May 2016 half term with a weeks worth of puppet making workshops, where the children would create their own puppet characters and begin to explore a story which we would come back in the summer and develop over a two-week period.

Our plan has been to start the children off on Arts Award Explore and focus on support as many as possible to achieve this award. As children do not attend all days run on the holiday club, we are hoping to still support those who have been actively involved but cannot commit to the whole project, in achieving Arts Award Discover.

During the half term period we delivered 4 project days of activities and created 7 puppet characters that we can use in our performance. We have also commissioned the build of a puppet theatre, which will remain at Parasol to help us sustain the project once the funding comes to an end.

Please revisit our project page in the summer where we will have an update on part two of this exciting project. This project is supported by Oxfordshire County Council with investment from Artswork Ltd, the Arts Councils South East Bridge organisation.