Bobby goes Round and Round!

The final performances for 2009 have taken place at the New Continental venue in our home town of Preston, Lancashire, and the Wharton Children’s Centre, Winsford, Cheshire.

Shakara Louise Ahad filled in brilliantly for Tids Pickard in the dance and movement role for this combination of performance and play activities based on research into Early Years schemas.

The success of these events really goes to show that Ball Pond Bobby can make the transition from theatres and arts centres into community venues. You can watch a short promotional video of Ball Pond Bobby from the early days here.

An integrated creative play session for children’s centres called ‘Round and Round’ is available from Imaginary Leaps at http://www.imaginaryleaps.com

Our final session for 2009, was using our Early Years shadows resources and our overhead projector to play with light and shadows in the DT3 space at the Dukes. Appletree Children’s Centre invited parents and chldren to come and play, releasing creative imagination and working with our trained Early Years artists to create a magical event for under 5’s.

We’ve concluded the series of Imaginary Leaps sessions we have been running at the Dukes, Lancaster as part of the outreach work developed with Appletree nursery. For ‘Baby Stages’ we brought in our own little puppet baby, Callum as part of the provision. Callum was a big hit with the children and parents as they played with the cushions, buckets, material, bells and percussion instruments.

Our series of  ‘Babystages’ sessions launched at DT3 at the Dukes Playhouse, Lancaster, with a delightful group of infants and parents and carers from Appletree Children’s Centre.

Movement and song combined with material and buckets, theatre lighting and sound to create a strongly engaging play session of imaginative engagement for the very earliest of theatre attenders.

The Dukes welcomed us into their DT3 space for a special Imaginary Leaps session with Appletree Children’s Centre based on the story of  ‘The Runaway Pancake’.

A very floury time was had by all: playing with flour, eating pancakes, listening to the story performed with ordinary kitchen objects and making pancake puppets to take home.

The children enjoyed playing, meeting our puppet cat, laughing at the pancake and getting messy!

This is the first session of a series to be held weekly as part of Appletree Children’s Centre’s outreach work.

Workshop held with Early Years practitioners at Toihaus Theatre, Salzburg in September 2009

On Friday October 16th DNA hosted a network meeting for Early Years arts at the Watermark, Preston.

Rachel not only talked about her Dandelion study trips to Bologna and Saltzburg in the morning but also gave an impromptu workshop  on ‘Transformational Object Theatre’ with early years practitioners.

Last week we spent the day at Droylsden Academy, Manchester, where we worked with an entire year 7 group (nearly 250 of them), getting them to design and make shadow puppets and scenery to stage the epic tale of ‘Beowulf’.

Over the past few months we have been working with The Ashton Group’s Youth Theatre in Barrow, and artistic director Rachel Ashton on their  new production of ‘The Selkie Boy’ based on the traditional Celtic myth.

We trained them in the design and performance methods on our life-sized ‘The Hoodies‘ puppets, and staging, creating and using shadow puppetry techniques to use in their forthcoming production.

Creating an underwater scene using shadows and light

Rachel has been to Claughton Childrens Centre on the Wirral near Liverpool to conduct an ‘Imaginary Leaps’ training session in creativity with staff from various local children’s centres.

In her report on the day, Debbie Hoy says “The training we received will support us in encouraging the development of children’s language and communication skills and support understanding of sustained shared thinking”

Debbie also says “It was very valuable having training in a specialist field such as puppetry delivered by someone who also clearly had an understanding of the EYFS which all our practitioners have regard to in their work.”