Past, Present & Future - a Festival of Creativity 2010

This event was conceived as a multi-arts, collaborative showcase of creative learning. One of its main aims was to celebrate the spirit of the present school building by engaging our students, staff and members of the local community in thinking about its spaces, its history and its legacy as we prepare to kove to a new building in 2011. The event was also a testbed for new ways of collaborating on, creating and presenting a huge variety of imaginative activities from a fashion show to a Pop Up Gallery. We are very grateful to the Friends of Tallis and our wonderful staff members for their support on both evenings. Most of all, we are still amazed by the talent and creativity of the students who will, no doubt, take the spirit of the old place to the new one and imbue it with the same qualities of dynamism and invention.

Here is a slideshow of some of the images taken during the two 'Past, Present & Future' events in July 2010. Many of the ideas featured in the Wallwisher (above) were included in some form on both nights. Feedback from audience members was very positive and we were delighted by the number of parents, carers and friends of the school who attended. Our students responded brilliantly and we learned a great deal about how to manage a large scale event featuring a variety of art forms.

Celebrating the talents of young people

Each summer we organise a celebration of the huge array of talents of our young people. In recent years, we have adopted the banner of Shine Week, a national festival of creativity. The film above documents a very special Shine Week in 2008 when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, visited the school and we appointed our very first student governors. We must have been very excited about this because the segemt appears twice in the film!

"Please pass on my thanks and admiration to all who created, participated in, and organised the fabulous carnival of 'Past, Present & Future'... we had a brilliant time ... once again your team brought colour, vibrancy and artists of all kinds to cheer on the end of term. Thanks!!"

Planning Past, Present & Future: A Festival of Creativity

We used the excellent Wallwisher to gather a range of proposals and ideas relating to 2010's Festival of Creativity at Thomas Tallis School. Our theme, Past, Present & Future, represented the social history of the school site, its origins in the early 1970s through to its current situation and imminent demise to make way for a brand new building in 2011. We wanted to explore what the building represents, how people feel about it, how it can be transformed into a venue for all manner of creative interventions and how it can still surprise us after all these years.

We worked with a variety of practitioners to energise the physical spaces and provoke thoughts and reflections about the relationship between our environment and our ability to be creative.

Dance Spinner

As part of our Festival of Creativity (2010) we commissioned Sarah Alexander and Guy Connelly to work with a group of Year 7 students using Dance Spinner to stimulate the creation of some site specific dance and music responses to the school building. The students explored the use of various digital devices to record, edit and share the products of their dance and music experiments. They took an experimental approach, reflecting on the relationships between dance, music and physical space. Their performances at the two festival events were really captivating.

This is one of the compositions Guy created using found sounds from the new school building under construction.