Leamington pupils perform their own '˜wonderful' show in Foundry Wood

Pupils from Clapham Terrace, Kingsway, St Patrick’s and Shrubland Street Primary Schools have been working on an Arts Active Network project run by Warwick Arts Centre over the past year. This included watching a professional performance by Mimika Theatre entitled Landscapes.

Inspired by this show, the children then worked with a puppeteer, a storyteller and a musician to make their own Landscapes show to share in Foundry Wood in Leamington.

At the heart of the performance were two large eggs and the audience were taken on a journey through the woods to find the place where the eggs could hatch, seeing different stories along the way.

The children took their audience to the freezing temperatures of the Antarctic, into the wild and unpredictable rainforest, down into the depths of the ocean and into the dusty desert. At each location, the audience was greeted by children acting, playing instruments, singing and operating the puppets they had made themselves.

Carly Mee, education officer at Warwick Arts Centre, said: “Landscapes was such a wonderful end-of-year production for the Arts Active Network. All four schools collaborated in each one of the ‘environments’, so a variety of children worked together and made new friends.

“The ethos behind the whole project is giving children the chance to see and make art, but also to give teachers and schools the tools they need to get art into the classroom and then out again, back into the community with a festival that can sustain itself for many years to come. It was great to see this taking shape already.”

The long term focus of the project between these schools and Warwick Arts Centre is to organise the first South Leamington Children’s Arts Festival in July 2017.

The project is being supported by funding from Warwick District Council, West Midlands Arts Connect and Warwick Arts Centre.