Our Stories, Our Places, Our Futures
A co-creation project working with young people in North East Derbyshire in partnership with Junction Arts.
Our Stories, Our Places, Our Futures is a co-creation project led by Adverse Camber in partnership with Junction Arts. Young people living in Bolsover, Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire, along with four professional storytellers (see below) formed an ensemble to create a performance and activities to showcase at Tapton Lock Festival in September 2022.
During 15 weekly ensemble sessions at West Studios in Chesterfield and a 5-day summer project at Bolsover Castle, young people explored themes of self, place and imagined futures, which resulted in the creation of new stories, poems, illustrated story cards, audio recordings and performances.
This short film gives a fantastic flavour of the project!
The project also included skills development training for the storytellers and a series of story-making outreach sessions with over 80 young people (aged 11-25) from Bolsover, Doe Lea and Chesterfield LGBT+ youth groups and Chesterfield College of Performing Arts courses.
Three audio recordings were created, find them and have a listen here.
The storytelling ensemble: Abbi, Alex, Artur, Dylan, Emma, Erin, Esme, Freya, Grace, Laci-Mae, Lukas, James, Joshua, Miranda, Nancy, Neve, Nicola, Penny, Robert, Savannah and Viola.
Storytelling-artists: Aoife O’Connor, Beccy Dye, Lewis Doherty and Maria Whatton.
Producers: Aly Stoneman for Adverse Camber and Jane Wells for Junction Arts.
Special thanks are due to English Heritage (Bolsover Castle) and West Studios in Chesterfield.
Our Stories, Our Places, Our Futures is a project working in partnership with Junction Arts and funded by Arts Council England with support from Derbyshire Community Foundation, the Gerard Pearse Family Fund.
Our Stories, Our Places, Our Futures is the first of four Derbyshire-based action research pilots initiated by Adverse Camber in response to a series of meetings with a diverse group of Midlands-based freelancers and organisations. These meetings uncovered very strong and genuine enthusiasm for diverse projects underpinned by story and storytelling, exploring key themes of identity, community and environment / ecology to help create resilient and connected communities.
Project Resources
Lots of great resources were created throughout the Our Stories, Our Places, Our Futures project including illustrated story cards, podcasts and poems!
Project Team
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