Arts culture and heritage

Strange Cargo

Using personal photographs to boost community cohesion

The photographs of Folkestone’s residents became art through a community project devised by Strange Cargo. The charity wanted to enthuse and give a voice to people in the seaside town, which has some of the poorest communities in the country and set up a project called Other People’s Photographs, which celebrated personal relationships with Folkestone using personal photos as source material.

Residents were told about the project by the media and word of mouth. In response, 800 people lent 1,800 photos dating from 1895 to the present day.

To fund and house the art work, Strange Cargo worked with Bride Hall, developers of a new town centre shopping development, who agreed to exhibit the project and contribute financially. The whole project took over two years to complete and cost £180,000.

The completed pieces of art work include 540 signs placed in Folkestone’s streets, showing photographs that were taken in the same streets some time in the past. There are also two 32 inch digital touchscreens in the town centre, with a third one planned for the coastal park. These units include all the photos loaned for the project, together with the voice recordings of each participant whose photo has been made into a street sign talking about the history of the photo.

The installation of the signs has enlisted an extremely positive response from people and access to private images belonging to others has created a new outlet for community dialogue by creating common ground amongst townsfolk, who, almost universally, respond to the notion of a family snapshot and images of their home town across a whole century.

One visitor to the exhibition remarked that she got in touch with a childhood friend who she hadn’t seen for 40 years after seeing her in one of the photos.  Another said it has created a long term impact on the town and given some people a sense of belonging.

Brigitte Oransinski
Artistic director
Georges House
8 The Old High Street
Folkestone
Kent
CT20 1RL
01303 244 533
www.strangecargo.org.uk
Reg no. 1068396

Streetwise Opera

Using opera to build self-esteem

Conservative MP and former housing minister Sir George Young once said that the homeless were the people you stepped over coming out of the opera. This comment reinforced the sentiments of residents at the Passage homeless shelter. They felt supported by the shelter and other agencies but felt excluded, misunderstood and disrespected by the public. Many residents had low self-esteem and others complained of having little to do day-to-day.

The MP’s comments were the impetus for Streetwise Opera. Passage residents decided that art would be the ideal vehicle to challenge the public’s assumptions of homeless people. If they were to put on an opera, it would show the public what they could achieve and the process would involve working together on a shared goal which would be something to look forward to.

For the past five years, the charity has run workshops, theatre trips, work placements in arts organisation, small performances and one annual major production involving homeless people. It has five centres across the country and in 2007 worked with 550 people.

Sally Taylor, Streetwise Opera’s chair, says the project is not about finding the next Pavarotti but showing people a way to get back into society: “After getting involved, some individuals contact family who they haven’t seen in years or start preparing to apply for job. It gets them to believe in themselves.”

Last year founder and chief executive Matthew Peacock was profiled in Gordon Brown’s book Britain’s Everyday Heroes for his work. Also, the project’s major production Critical Mass, which depicted the inability of politics to solve anything, was short listed for opera of the year by two broadsheet critics in competition with organisations like the Royal Opera House.

Sally Taylor
Chair of trustees
26 Binney Street London W1K 5BN
020 7495 3133
www.streetwiseopera.org
Reg no. 1092931

Women & Theatre

Using theatre to explore equality and diversity issues

The delight in training without Power Point or a person speaking for three hours were some of the reactions to Women & Theatre’s equality and diversity training for Walsall Primary Care Trust. The Trust commissioned Women & Theatre to research, devise and deliver an interactive training programme exploring equality and diversity in the workplace for all their employees.

To shape the training, the charity carried out numerous interviews with employees at all levels in the Trust, from community nurses to chief executives. Interviews were also carried out on the streets of Walsall focusing on what equality and diversity means to you. The results fed into a creative training workshop on equality and diversity.

Trainers would act out short scenes with anecdotes based on real experiences relating to equality and diversity so it was practical, recognisable and believable to those in the sessions. Then using the role plays as examples, participants would create their own scenes reflecting what equality and diversity meant to them. Afterwards, the scenes were discussed. In total Women & Theatre gave 56 sessions over seven weeks, with up to 30 participants in each session.

Informally throughout the session and formally at the end, participants were asked to evaluate their experience and learning during the training. Nearly all said the training was relevant to their role, appropriate to their needs and accessible and easy to understand.

Ruth Richardson, general manager of Women & Theatre, says: “The training really challenged the conception of equality and diversity for us and the participants. It’s not just about specific groups as we are all different and unique and this richness and diversity should be celebrated. As a result of our training the Trust is setting up further committees on equality and diversity to ensure it is celebrated positively.”

Terina Talbot
Company member
220 Moseley Road
Birmingham
B12 ODG
0121 440 4203
www.womenandtheatre.co.uk
Reg no. 518580

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