This process culminated in a large scale site specific performance event set in the home ground of Arthurlie Footbal team and involved art and performances from over 300 local people.

This project was commissioned and managed by the National Theatre of Scotland

One All Press:

The Herald http://www.heraldscotland.com/feels-like-team-spirit-in-barrhead-1.838720

We came together eight weeks ago knowing little about each other.

Public Displays of Rhythm was created in collaboration with artist James Leadbitter, students from the Contemporary Performance programme at the Royal Scottish of Music and Drama and a group of adults supported by Key Housing. This group spent eight weeks getting to know each other before hosting a performance and party in the Langside Halls, Glasgow.

Supported by the RSAMD and The Ormonde and Mildred Duveen Trust

How do we affect the land on which we live?

We were asked to deliver a project for the National Theatre of Scotland with young people from Lochgilphead in Scotland in response to Half Life a large scale site specific performance they were doing with NVA in the area. And so we teamed up with visual artist Rachel O’Neill, video artist James Leadbitter, musician Brian James and 100 S3 students from Lochgilphead High School to create HERE.

We thought about what it meant to be local in a place that was popular with tourists for its history and heritage. We created a map of the area with large red dots marking a place that was personally significant to each of the young people on the project. We then created large versions of the dots and placed them around the landscape with text on them which explained why the place was so special. Tourists were then encouraged to use the map to go on an alternative route – a route made up of individual memories and personal histories of the area, the things you would never ordinarily know.

HERE culminated in a large scale performance piece in the grounds of the High School that was about to be demolished. It was a way of marking a moment in history that involved those people in that time.

This project was commissioned and managed by the National Theatre of Scotland

In many ways this project has been about reminiscing and about looking back, not just on Govan and the way things used to be, but on lives lived, past and present. We have all discussed a little of the world as we find it and come out at the end of it feeling like we have really met people, people who have mattered to us.

We would encourage you, not to watch our performance tonight in search of any one story, as there are really too many in there to count. We prefer to think of it as a collection of moments– of things which have touched us– things we have learned– relationships built– fragments of memory placed alongside one another all in one show– for one night.

In October 2007 we worked with students from the Contemporary Performance Practice programme at the RSAMD, artist James Leadbitter and members of the Govan Reminiscence group to make Are Ye Askin?

This was a creative project designed to look at Govan, an area of Glasgow previously famous for ship building with a rich heritage and history. We went to regular meetings of the Reminiscience Group, a group of older residents that meet each week with the goal of actively remembering the area as it was as well as participating in the politics of its present.

With their stories, memories and artefacts we made a site specific piece of theatre in the Pearce Institute in Govan and invited an audience to join us in an evening of stories, song and dancing.

Supported by RSAMD and The Ormonde and Mildred Duveen Trust

THIS CITY:
YOU DESERVE TO BE HERE AS MUCH AS ANYONE ELSE

In preparation for National Festival of Youth Theatre (2008) we teamed up with a group of young people from the city of Aberdeen, three local trainee leaders, and Designer Rachel O’Neill. Together we created ‘THIS CITY’ an interactive creative project aiming to find new and interesting ways to introduce the city of Aberdeen to its visiting guests.

Over the summer we took a set of huge white letters spelling THIS CITY out into the streets and completed a series of tasks designed to engage with the people and places of Aberdeen.

We collected stories from passers by, made the longest ever list of things worth knowing about the city, created encouraging banners for the general public and hosted the record attempt for the most amount of people to line dance together in Aberdeen.

The result of these tasks and the experiences made up the THIS CITY performance which opened the NFYT Festival in Aberdeen in October 2008.

This project was commissioned and funded by Promote YT (Scotland)

This festival saw 100 young people from international schools all over the world come to Glasgow and stay with local young people of the city. Together they then engaged in a creative exploration the notion of Home and made a series of site specific works culminating in a large scale performance of the popular Scottish dance; the Slosh.

People tell us that young people in countries from Turkey to Thailand can still be seen doing the slosh which proves that it is always important to dance together…

This show took place on a Glasgow city tour bus traditionally used for taking tourists around the city and showing them the sights. We decided to develop this idea a little and make our own site specific performances in response to the city and our experiences of living there. We invited an audience onto the bus to come and see these performances as an alternative way to view the landscape of the city of Glasgow.

Supported by the RSAMD

We decided we would like to meet the people who lived in Farnham and so we created a portable tea party that could be assembled anywhere and that would allow us to share tea and home made cake with people we would otherwise not have met. We took it to train stations, supermarkets, parks, universities and car parks. We sat in the sunshine and rain in tea dresses and with a tea service we had bought at the local Save The Children Charity shop and waited.

There was no agenda – just that we hoped people would join us and that we might have some really interesting conversations. We did…

After this we took our tea parties to lots of different towns including Bracknell and Southampton with the FRESH Festival.

We find ourselves out of college, out of work, out of sorts.

In 2004 we graduated from university in Glasgow and felt a little bit terrified about what to expect and what would come next. We felt that 14 years of education may have made us institutionalised and we worried about the norms, values and expectations we saw placed on young people. We decided to make a piece of work about this feeling, this fear…

We wanted to engage with other people who may have experienced this fear and so we created flyers and posters simply asking; ‘what is this fear?’ with an e mail address that they contact us.

We received lots of responses that helped us to make the performance THIS FEAR which we performed at the Reading Arts Centre, the Farnham Maltings, the Bourne Hall in Hastings as part of the FRESH Festival and at the Q! Gallery in Glasgow. This work was made possible by support from South Hill Park in Bracknell and the Arts Council of England.

We would like to say thank you to those of you that responded. It is always nice to know you are not alone.