What a Week at Rural Arts!
This week has been full of events and workshops! Throughout the week we have been running our October Half Term art workshops at Rural Arts, CREATETour drama workshops in Redcar, and our Inter-Generational art project,”Generation Exchange”, at Sowerby House. As well as this we’ve had the Community Fund Dance Workshop with Jennie Ruth Workshops deliver their final performance, a Tea Dance at Thirsk Town Hall as part of our Art on Your Doorstep project, and our CREATETour young promoters have been helping us run the Garlic Theatre production of Three Little Pigtails, which also toured to Skipton Town Hall this week as part of ON Tour. It’s been an absolutely amazing week and just the perfect example of what Rural Arts is all about! Read below to find out everything we got up to!
Spooky Activities for October Half Term
Throughout the week we had four different workshops on for October Half Term.
On Tuesday, Poppy had the little ones making their very own terracotta haunted castles. We had some wonderfully creepy castles created. The children decorated their castles with all sorts of halloween themed objects, including magical witch hats, petrifying pumpkins, mysterious monsters and gruesome graveyards!
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On Wednesday we ran two more workshops; paper “Fairytale Puppets” in the morning, taught by the lovely Michelle and some yummy “Spooky Cupcakes” in the afternoon, taught by the fabulous Charlotte.
For the fairytale puppets, the children made three different types of puppets, including peg puppets and fortune teller puppets. They were all halloween themed and super spooky!
In the afternoon the children that attended our workshop were in for a treat, as they decorated some tasty chocolate cupcakes with fondant icing and buttercream; making ghosts, witches hats, spiders and bats! ? ? ?
On Thursday Poppy ran a Three Little Pig Puppets workshop before the Three little Pigtails show in the afternoon. The puppets they made were adorable!
Community Fund Dance Workshop
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| Jo (Pictured far left) with Jennie Ruth workshops mid-pose. |
Tea Dance at Thirsk Town Hall
We also had more fabulous dancing on Tuesday, for which we hosted a Tea Dance at Thirsk Town Hall, along with Thirsk Rotary Club and Butterflies Dance
We had 30 people attend the dance. The lovely ladies from Butterflies Dance taught us how to foxtrot, quickstep, cha-cha and tango. We had a great time trying out the Charleston too; the perfect dance for those that didn’t feel as confident in partner work, as the steps could be done solo!
Even those that didn’t fancy a dance, said they enjoyed themselves, and thought it was great to watch everyone dancing together, young and old . It certainly brought back some fond memories for some people…
During the Tea Dance, we chatted to Jean, who had come along with her friend Shiela. (a regular participant of our Art on Your Doorstep project.) Jean told us about where she used to live in Newcastle and the dances they used to go to all the time at the ballroom in Whitley Bay. Sheila had convinced her to come along to the event after Jean had enjoyed Norman Fitzpatrick play his classical music at another Art on Your Doorstep event.
A special thanks goes to Gail who organised the event! Sadly Tuesday was her last day here at Rural Arts. She will be greatly missed, but we’re sure she will be popping in very soon to come along to some of our community workshops!
Generation Exchange
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| Seth with one of the residents at Sowerby House |
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| Munro and John: Two of the residents at Sowerby House |
Throughout the week Poppy and Sorcha also ran the inter-generational project “Generation Exchange“, for which they teamed up with Sowerby House and the young people from Art Club, to deliver workshops to the residents. It was such a lovely experience to see what a difference it made to the residents to be able to meet new people and have the chance to chat with people outside of the home.
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| Mary’s creation |
For the workshops we taught them how to create art using an I-Pad. A lot of them had never seen an I-Pad before, so it was certainly a very new experience to them. However, they were all very happy by the end of the workshops and were all beaming at us as we waved goodbye!
Isobel was one of our young people to take part in the project. She created a word collage with one of the residents, Mary. It contained words all about Mary’s family, travels and work. Sorcha also met two lovely ladies named Munro and Margaret. Munro had a particularly cheeky send of humour and Margaret told Sorcha all about her parents and her love of gardening.
We will be running an exhibition of all the work the residents created during the week, later on in the year, so make sure you keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter for pictures of all their work!
Three Little Pigtails
On Thursday afternoon we also had a sold out show, of Three Little Pigtails from Garlic Theatre. We had four lovely young promoters helping us run the show and Iklooshar from Garlic Theatre was absolutely wonderful!
Make sure you keep an eye out for the upcoming blog post all about our Young Promoters experience of the day!
#CREATETour
