Over the past three years, over 3000 children, young people and adults have experienced puppetry, visual theatre and animated film on their doorsteps through our Captivate programmes in North Lanarkshire, Caithness, Uist and Edinburgh.
As we head towards the end of our third year of working in these communities – we wanted to share some of the highlights!
Since 2021 we’ve worked with lead partners WHALE Arts, Taigh Chearsbhagh, Lyth Arts and Cumbernauld Theatre on over 30 projects within our focus regions.
This has included developing project offers like ‘Visual Virtuoso’.
Visual Virtuoso is our live music and animation project, which we delivered first in the Outer Hebrides with Nevis Ensemble and Taigh Chearsabhagh and last year in Edinburgh West with Big Noise Wester Hailes, SCOREscotland and WHALE Arts.
The project works with groups of young people aged 8-12 over 3 months to create an animated film and live music soundtrack that is performed for friends and family as part of a community celebration.
Award-winning animators, Cat Bruce and Gavin Robinson, have worked with us to devise workshop sessions for the young people to learn the ropes of loop frame animation before creating a digitally animated film with the young people’s characters, backgrounds and stories.
There is a demand for animation that has grown from the programme – it’s the ‘go to’ creative response for our students now (Taigh Chearsabhagh)
Take a look at the film below created last year by young people from SCOREscotland, Big Noise Wester Hailes after school groups and WHALE Arts SmARTies group.
Part of what we’ve been doing with Captivate is aiming to develop and support creative networks between community organisations, local councils, arts venues, creative organisations, local artists and visual theatre experts that we hope will go on to work together to deliver more creative projects thanks to these new connections and a better understanding of what visual theatre can mean.
As part of this we’ve established micro-touring routes within regions, supporting some community spaces to host performances for the first time and delivered linked engagement to support families to feel confident to take a chance on puppetry.
This is something completely new for our community! (Getting Better Together, Shotts, NL)
Micro-tours of Akadesh Odera’s Little Murmur in the Outer Hebrides, Rogue Play Theatre’s Forests in North Lanarkshire and adaptation of Tortoise in a Nutshell’s Hibernate for community venues in Edinburgh West have all contributed to building new routes for visual theatre, puppetry and animation artists to tour work sustainably.
This has also enabled our delivery to be hyper-local, with 83% of participants last year being able to take part within 15 minutes of their homes.
To see that magic can happen with real people in a real, familiar place – so beautiful! (Participant, North Uist)
We’ve worked with over 100 artists as facilitators, performers or participants in artist development opportunities like our Visual Theatre Labs.
Visual Theatre Labs are an opportunity for artists to spend a day or a weekend together being introduced to visual theatre techniques. Working with Lyth Arts this year we brought puppeteer and micro-cinema expert Gavin Glover and digital technology theatre maker and movement artist Althea Young to Caithness for a 2-day residency.
Part of the power of our artforms is their visual nature, which means they can be accessed by those who might struggle to engage or feel welcome to attend traditional theatre performances or activity, this is particularly true of those with communication access needs or for those for whom English is a second language.
We’ve worked hard to embed access within our Captivate offer, supporting artists to create and platform new work for d/Deaf audiences or to develop engagement offers that can support their non-verbal performances to reach more people, like Hopeful Monsters who we worked with at Cumbernauld Theatre to develop an accessible workshop offer for families, and Strange Loop who we worked with in partnership with Play Sense Create to deliver one-to-one sessions with families.
Two of our young people use a talker to communicate –they were able to creatively participate – visually and using their voices to create unique soundscapes (Play Sense Create, Edinburgh)
The really special part of Captivate is our approach as a national organisation, working in a hyper local context, closely working, aligning and being led by our community based partners and their networks to generate projects and performances that respond to need. In this way we’re able to support artists working regionally and nationally to develop their practice, grow demand and understanding for animation, puppetry and visual theatre, increase access to experiences for young people, children and families on their doorsteps– and support our arts partners to do what they do best, bringing an extra dollop of magic to their ongoing programmes through our specialist networks!
It has been a great experience for me and my children – thank you so much! (Participant, Edinburgh)
Read our report from 2023-2024 here.
Keep an eye out for Captivate projects coming to your area through our area pages.