Minerva Tumbles

This case study was written by Jude, our Lache and Upton Facilitator as part of a funding requirement for this group, we loved it so much we thought it would be good to share. 

At the start of the programme when the participant joined, the young person was facing many issues at home and during her school life, this became apparent after the first few weeks of the sessions. The young person lacked confidence, although she had strong knowledge of drama and devising techniques. Originally the participant began the sessions with her younger nephew and mention that she was there to support him while he explored drama classes for the first time. The participant shared information about how they adored drama although they did not really like it at school and overall, they struggled somewhat at school. 

During the first term the participant lacked belief, and would often put herself down even though she was given praise regularly. The participant was forthcoming with ideas and seemed happy to be part of the pilot drama scheme. During the pilot the participants contribution was noteworthy, she had a significant impact on the wider group, her attitude and readiness to get stuck in propelled others in the group to feed off her enthusiasm for the group as a whole. 

The participant consistently supported the group, explaining games, sharing ideas and being able to help with setting up the class if handouts were present, or the room needed arranging. At the end of the pilot the group performed a short-devised play ‘Welcome to Planet Kronos’ a devised piece of theatre centred around superheroes in a dystopian planet called Kronos. After the first show the participant had a chat with the Youth Workshop Leader and expressed how much she had enjoyed the project and was hopeful the sessions would continue on a long term basis. It was wonderful to hear positive feedback and see just how inspired this young individual was from having the opportunity to participate in this type of arts activity out in her local community. 

The participant mentioned numerous times how her school life was anything other than ideal, unfortunately she has experienced bullying from an early age, which has impacted her confidence. Over the course of the weeks during our classes the student had offered snippets about her homelife, it became clear the student had experienced diverse issues at an early age. Having the opportunity to participate in further productions and community arts experiences was vital in this young person’s growth and self-development. Experiences in Youth Theatre at Lache would enable her to express herself and gain further self- belief, therefore improving her life chances and opportunities in later life. 

Over the course of our delivery at Lache this young person has missed two sessions, when a parent was undergoing serious surgery. Her commitment to the group has been invaluable, not only from a peer modelling perspective, she has also gained considerable personal growth, in areas of confidence, public speaking, research skills, group communication and having the chance to mentor and support other younger members of the team.  

Over the last couple of weeks we have begun to move from the devising phase of the Our Lache project into rehearsal. This is a challenging time, not least because it involved the young people having to remember what groups they worked in three weeks ago! So far we have worked through the Manors of Marlston and Lache and the time travel through form the Medieval through to the 19th Century which means that we are halfway through putting together the final piece. So far we have used a range of different techniques including still images and role play. Next week we will be really challenging ourselves by trying to refresh the final part of the story where we move into the 20th Century and look at the development of the ‘garden village’ and the advantages and disadvantages that the local people found upon moving in from their city centre slum dwellings. 

On the 27th October 2019, Minerva celebrated our 10th Birthday. This was an opportunity for us to look back over the last 10 years and think about our achievements, the people we have worked with and projects that we have set up. We held an event at Tarvin Community Centre on the 26th which was attended by over 50 people who came to share the celebration and help us with the process of fundraising for the next phase of our work. 

Over the last 10 years we have grown from a tiny organisation with a couple of projects under our belt to a slightly less tiny organisation with a rather substantial programme that takes quite a lot of work to sustain and support. I listed a few of our biggest achievements on the night so I thought I would also put them here. 

1. Our Youth Theatres. In 2011 we took over the remnants of the Chester Gateway Youth Theatre form our friends at Off the Ground. In the next year we staged our first show, Life of Galileo with a group of six young people. In the intervening period we have started new groups all over Cheshire, closed a couple, re-assessed a lot and staged innumerable performances of varying different scales. Those young people who come every week remain our greatest achievement. 

2. Heritage Work. We discovered our love of heritage projects almost by accident. In 2013 we were funded in a partnership with River Niger Arts to create a project about Edmund Morel, a hidden hero who exposed human rights abuses in the Congo. This was followed by Mabel’s War (our partnership with CWAC Museums and Cheshire Military Museum) and the Souling Project in 2017 as well as lots of smaller Youth Theatre projects that focused on heritage themes. 

3. Lynk Cheshire. This project ran from 2014-2016 and brought together groups from different areas of Cheshire to develop their skills. It was a great way of pushing our young people to work in different ways and for us to create new relationships. 

4. Social Action and partnerships. Through our relationships with UK Youth, the Stop Loan Sharks fund and CHAWREC we have taken on projects that have enabled young people to explore wider social issues and investigate how the arts can support them to create change in their own community. 

All of this contributes to our wider aims and plans for the future but now is the time to close on chapter and look to the next. At the end of the night I asked all those assembled to do three things to support us in the next few years:

DONATE

ATTEND

TALK

Week Three and Four of the Our Lache project have flown by in a flash! In week three we looked at time travelling through from the 1300s-1800s, showing he changes that happened in the area between these years. We looked at the church and the nuns who held the land and the various families such as the Mainwarings and the Breretons that would have owned the land. In this session we used a lot of still images brought to life to provide our way in to creating performance, we also considered the different ways that we could show the audience that we were travelling through different time periods through using our bodies. 

In week four we brought the story a little more up to date by looking at the development of the first estate in the area and the slum clearances. We picked up the story in 1919 when the Addison Act asked corporations to start providing homes of a decent standard to ordinary people. We met Professor Abercrombie who was the adviser on the project and the architect James Strong. We also met some families who moved into the first houses and got to see what they liked about their new dwellings but also what the problems o the new estate were. 

On the 3rd October we started a brand new project working with two schools in Lache to explore the heritage of their area and create a brand new piece of performance that celebrates it. This project is a unique one in bringing together Lache Primary and St. Clares, neighbouring primary schools for the first time! So a large part of our first session was supporting the young people to get to know one another, to collaborate and to start working together as one cohesive team. 

We focused on physical skills in this workshop with activities like 10 second object helping the group to start thinking creatively and as a team. We then moved on to asking the groups to create short movement pieces based on their own personal identities and the thing that they think are the best about living or going to school in Lache. 

Since we have been asking for your support more in the last few months through donating to our #10for10 challenges and buying tickets for our event I though tit would be a good thing to tell you a bit more about what your money actually pays for. 

Our Youth Theatre programme as it stands currently (8 weekly Youth Theatres and some holiday club activity) costs around £13,000 per year to run. 

The main outgoings we have to run this programme are:

*Our staff. Our staff are our biggest asset and paying for them is one of the most important things we do. They are all well qualified and experienced practitioners who can switch from directing a play one minute to supporting a young person with a personal issue the next! 

*Our venues. Venues really differ in how much they charge, but are usually somewhere between £10 and £20 per hour (all our sessions are two hours). We value our relationships with these venues because they are all community owned and usually volunteer led, so our payments help support them to do the work that they need to do to support their community. We also have to hire venues to put on our shows!

*Tech. To make our shows look great, we have to light them well, provide sound and music, have projections and sometimes provide some additional amplification to our young people’s voices when we perform in difficult or unusual spaces. We have some of our own kit but sometimes this isn’t enough and we have to hire a bit more. We also have to have someone on board who can operate it all and make our young people look fabulous. All of this can sometimes add up to an extra £250-300 onto our spend for a show. 

*Props, Costumes, Sets. We have a bit of an unwritten rule at Minerva that we like as much of the stuff you see on stage to have been made by the members as possible. We have a DIY ethic and a ‘keep it simple’ aesthetic to let the work of the young people shine through. So although we are not often to be found hiring complex sets or elaborate costumes, we have to be clever in how we source those bits and pieces that make a visual impact. Whether a tiny item for £5 or a piece of furniture for £50 it has to do a job for us!

Minerva is 10 years old this year. I’ll just let that sink in for a moment. 10 years! So much has happened since the gloomy October evening where Hayley and I first decided to set ourselves up in business. Starting up as a partnership, evolving into a charity in 2012, taking over our first Youth Theatre group in 2011, getting Arts Council funding in 2013 to expanding to eight Youth Theatre groups in 2018!

Earlier this year we decided as a team that we needed to do something to mark the journey, to celebrate everything that we have achieved so far and to set a tone for the next ten years. We chose two different things, both of which are designed to challenge us as a team and to raise some all important funds to take us forward.

Firstly, we started a fundraising campaign called #10for10. This campaign involves all of the staff team undertaking a challenge that involves the number 10. This includes a 10k run, a 100k cycle challenge, learning BSL, baking a 10 tier cake and making craft challenge. Each of these challenges either raises money itself or will feature in our second Birthday highlight which is...

Our 10th Birthday Party! On the 26th October at 8pm in Tarvin Community Centre we will be welcoming friends and family from across the area to help us celebrate with a programme of cabaret performances, food provided by the Ottomen, a free drink on arrival and a bar all night.

You are all invited to come and support this event, tickets can be bought at this link www.ticketsource.co.uk/minerva-arts

If you need any information, please get in touch at [email protected]

I haven’t written a blog on here for quite a long time but as I sit at the first Cheshire West Voluntary Action conference I figured this is as good a place as any to deposit some thoughts that are spurred on by the day. 

Thought number one: how can the cultural sector become better involved in building local economies? This morning’s first presentation was from Tom Lloyd- Goodwin from CLES (www.cles.org.uk) who talked about local wealth building through the model of inclusive economy. This model centres around the re-distribution of wealth held by ‘anchor institutions’ through innovative re-thinking around local commissioning, supporting new enterprise and the all important issue of paying a living wage. A question was raised about the absence of cultural institutions from the list of anchors; a valid question but also one with a fairly clear answer. 

As far as I am concerned, the cultural sector as we stand currently is not an anchor in localities. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, we simply do not hold enough resource to be able to meaningfully contribute to wealth building and distribution. This is not a ‘poor me’, self-pitying whinge about the lack of arts funding, purely a factual observation. Secondly, we are a fractured and competitive sector that has certainly ‘swallowed the lexicon of the market’ (to quote John Tizard), competing for resources, participants and audiences. 

But the sector absolutely CAN play a role in this process, supported by a re-appraisal from those within the more conventional anchor bodies. Here are th suggestions that first came to my mind: 

*Local councils should support arts and cultural organisations to better engage with contracts and tendering. This would be helped by a better level of communication between arts teams and other council services. 

*Connected to this first point, councils need to be able to think ‘outside the box’  (sorry!) about how contracts can be delivered. The responsibility here, however, also lies with cultural organisations who need to be honest and clear about what they can and cannot deliver. If we try and be all things to all people then we only end up delivering a service badly and spoiling the party for everyone else. 

*We need to be connected in to built environment discourse. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not all about the buildings, but it is clear that arts and culture can play a great role in re-invigorating disused space, animating public open spaces** and bringing creativity to town planning. The Doncaster Local Cultural Education partnership has done some great work in this area (https://weareive.org/impact/policy-planning-and-priorities-the-story-so-far-for-doncasters-local-cultural-education-partnership/).  

*Career progression and employment opportunities for young people who want to enter the sector need to be stronger and more vocationally focussed. We are severely lagging behind in offering apprenticeships and other styles of work-related training, without these, we lose an important part of workforce development to lack of money, flocking to larger conurbations and the push to go to university. This is a resourcing issue but also a psychological issue for the sector. 

(**I want to highlight here that these brilliant potentials for arts and culture in the built environment DO NOT COME FOR FREE. Councils, developers BIDs etc. must not attempt to solve their place and space-related problems through offering ‘great opportunities’ to arts and cultural organisations. Find the money, pay us and prepare to be amazed.) 

The first day, I went to Greenbank School for a drama lesson about Frankenstein, and around 11am we went to the University of Chester (were I normally had to go everyday). There, I did some research to know about Minerva Arts and how they fund their activities. The second day, I had to find “strange” National Days, make a sort of calendar with them and think different ideas for performances with three National Days-I chose to do it about the National Be Someone Day, the National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day and the National Parents as Teachers Day. 

The third day, I posted some pictures and scheduled posts about information for after half term on their Facebook page. And in the night (7-9pm), I made part of their Chester Seniors group. On Thursday, we went to a drama lesson with children educated at home for an hour. Then we went back to the University where I scheduled posts in Twitter this time. And the last day, on Friday, I had fun because I did some crafts. First I did 30 small quotes about dreams for a future performance and then I cut some masks for children to decorate.

This week I’ve obviously learnt things about Minerva Arts and drama, but about how to work with children and tips to get money to fund activities/run a business as well. And I learnt how to use Facebook and Twitter because I had never used them before.

I’ve enjoyed the whole week in general, but the school lesson and the lesson with the group of children were really great, and I enjoyed them a lot. And I also enjoyed quite much the social media things and the crafts on Friday!

This week we have a new work experience student with us. Ellie-Jo Farnan from Neston High is with us for two whole weeks and she has written a blog for us about what she has been up to during her first week. 

During the week in Minerva Arts I have learnt new skills involving how to prepare for a lesson and the skills needed.

For example I learnt how to prepare for lessons by creating props for one of the drama pieces a group of the younger students are going to perform.

My task was to make prop cogs for their piece using resources like cardboard, this was harder than I thought it would be due to how accurate they would have to look for the piece.

Personally I felt like I didn't do a very good job at creating the cogs, after the day had finished and the students who come to the lesson were taking photos with different props one of my cogs I made were with the props for the photos and one of the students asked what it was because they could not tell that it was a cog.  

However we will possibly be painting them in a few days time, by doing this I hope to make them look more realistic looking an as cog like as possible.

I have also tried out on how to make a leaflet stand out to people and what makes it look appealing to people viewing it. One way i did this was by using a dull background and a big bright title that will catch peoples eye.

I also used small notes the get important points across because it makes the leaflet easier to read an keeps the reader's attention rather than lots of writing.

Being a young person in a youth group has really helped me with confidence and helped me express thoughts and ideas. Being in a youth group gives me great opportunities to be creative and involved with creative activities.

A good example would be what i got to do last weekend, Minerva arts takes part in the parades that go through town. The winter watch parade has been going on Chester at since the 1400, Last year i had my first winter watch parade on Thursday the 7th of December and another on the 14th the week after. We took part as devils, the atmosphere is incredible. 

Last week was the summer watch parade, they do two every year, last year we were dragons and held a staff with a dragon head on it while we danced through town. This year we were antelopes, we had had face paint, a light brown fabric with patterns relating to antelopes over it and a staff with an antelope head with what looked like a dream catcher underneath it. Some of the wind chimes had bells on them so that when you stamp it on the floor the bells would ring and make a nice noise. We thought that it would be a good idea to stamp the staffs to the beat of the music by the samba, and so we did on both days and it sounded really good.

As soon as you arrive at where everyone meets, everyone is getting ready and are immediately blown away. As you walk in there are giant puppets lying on the floor, props, costumes and people going around in costumes. When you are in the work shop the puppets are completely still and lifeless but when people direct them and make them move they completely come to life and it is like they are real. Especially the unicorns, they are giant and made out of small shreds of fabric to look like fur, they are like the heads of unicorns so that the people inside them are free to run around the crowd, go up to people and most of all spin around so that the fabric looks wonderful.  

There are puppets that are put on the back of the people who carrie them, they have long sticks holding the puppets hands up and moving them around. The puppets heads also movie because they aren't held in place so they just move around without being controlled, they don’t move around much but the slight movement make them look so much more realistic.

At some points there was even coloured smoke!

As well as all the puppets and props there is loads of people playing a part like i was.

Along with the crowds of people who come to watch it.

The artistic director and producer is Russell kirk, who i got to work with in the work shop while making the outfits and props. He is a professional artist who makes puppets for a living, it is inspirational to see someone who works in the arts like he does. It can be hard to work in the arts, and whenever someone asks me what i want to do in the future and i tell them that i want to work within the arts they tell me that its hard. So to see someone who has come so far in that kind of job is really cool.

This term at Malpas Youth Theatre a young person came to me and said that they can’t make the next performance date due to other commitments. This often happens in youth theatre and we make sure to include anyone who for whatever reason can’t be in a show. 

Therefore, this term they will be making props and pieces of costume instead. Last week they focused on creating a crown for the main villain in our piece, made out of plastic bottle tops and random crafty items that have been left over from previous projects. 

There are so many roles within theatre, from directing, stage management, lighting, sound to make up and props/costumes. Minerva tries where possible to give all our members an opportunity to experience all these areas if it interests them.