This Spring/Summer, Edventure Frome will offer a free two month training programme for young adults to explore what it means to make a livelihood in the arts.
Participants will collaborate with local community groups, organisations and institutions to design, promote, produce and perform an immersive theatre experience as part of Frome Festival that shares histories, memories and visions of local people. The aims of the production are to be professional, informative, inclusive, innovative, playful, sustainable, accessible and financially viable. Throughout the creative process participants will be provided with mentoring, training and opportunities to develop diverse skills, including performance, promotion, production, facilitation, design, construction, stage management and technical skills. By building local connections, participants will be provided with a network of opportunities to support their engagement with the arts in the future.
Beyond the performance, participants will be given the opportunity to engage in 6 months of mentoring and peer-led support to take their skills forwards in their pursuit of an arts-based livelihood, along with the potential to take the community performance model to the next level and set up a theatre company, or develop their own personal creative projects and learning opportunities.
Frome is a thriving town full of creativity and vision, as well as being home to a rich living history. However, with extensive funding cuts for the arts, and greater hostility towards cultural diversity locally and nationally, new models are needed that integrate communities directly in creative processes that reach across difference, offering a platform for local institutions, community groups, organisations and artists to collaborate and create together. Frome’s Local Legends project intends to train local young people in the arts, whilst opening just such a space for telling stories that celebrate the creativity and diversity of the town and its people.
Edventure is looking for mentors, collaborators, course-contributors and participants for this project, for more information and to apply go to www.edventurefrome.org/legends
Ben Macfadyen and Biz Bliss will co-lead on this project.
Ben Mali Macfadyen is a Frome born facilitator, storyteller and collaborative artist who has worked with a wide spectrum of community groups across the U.K. to create innovative site-specific theatre. He is interested in the ways stories can form bridges of understanding, and act as transformative tools for creating more connected people and places.Biz Bliss
Biz sees herself as a bee, cross pollinating ideas and connecting resources with people to make ideas happen. Having been around at the conceptual stages of Edventure when she lived on a boat with Johannes, she spent some time exploring ways of effecting change in a spectrum of ways from activism to government and NGOs to corporates, then packed in the office life to sail to the other side of the world and learn about community building in Brazil, before coming to her senses and returning home to Edventure in Frome. She realised that the innovation stage – in social enterprise and alternative educational models – is where the interesting things happen, and it’s fun working with young adults to make the seemingly impossible possible. Biz could be described as an artist, facilitator, sailor and trouble-maker amongst other things.
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