Creative Practitioners
One of the distinctive features of the work we have done through the Creative Partnerships programme and as a School of Creativity is the establishment of long term, highly collaborative relationships with leading creative practitioners. Visitors to school bring with them not only an impressive range of talents and skills but also a fresh perspective and a dispassionate eye. They have invariably helped us identify particular qualities and strengths, challenged some of our assumptions and engaged both staff members and students in an exciting range of activities. Some of the many partnerships with creative practitioners are detailed below.
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The designs express several ideas: favourite memories of the existing building; imaginary future careers; and thought experiments expressed in the form of imaginative questions. Mixed in with these are instructions designed to provoke the viewer to reflect on their behaviour and try a new way of looking at the world.
The final illustrations will appear in large atrium spaces in each of the main classroom blocks and will be either vinyl transfers or handpainted illustrations. Each of these 15 spaces is 10m by 4m. In addition there will be two large handpainted illustrations either side of the main entrance and a series of 20 individual designs situated in a variety of other spaces across the site. Check out the full story of the project on the dedicated blog. |
Tallis Graphics - Gilles & Cecilie Studio
Our new school building (due to open in November 2011) is a state of the art structure designed by John McAslan + Partners. It will provide us with wonderful facilities and fantastic spaces in which to pursue our ambition to embed creative learning across the curriculum. We were very keen to make this commitment visible within the design of the building and also honour the tradition of wall decoration that has been such an important feature of the culture of learning in the present school. Inspired by our involvement in the Sorrell Foundation's Joinedupdesignforschools initiative, we decided to adopt the model of students as clients and established a mixed age design team to manage the project. We wrote a brief (see below) and invited 4 graphic design teams to interview for the job of designing wall graphics for several clearly identified spaces in the new school building. We selected Gilles & Cecilie Studio and collaborator Nina Ansten based on their previous work and the spirit of fun and creativity evident in their design philosophy.
We organised two whole day idea generation workshops at Tate Modern which proved to be exemplars of creative thinking. The designs opposite were created based on the ideas generated by the design team during these sessions. |
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We are very proud to announce that this project, along with others, was awarded best exhibit at the Royal Festival Hall's summer 2011 'Festival of '51' show in the Schools of Creativity Pavilion, winning the £3500 Casio Bright Minds prize.
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Tallis Uniform - Alina Brieul Moat
When we decided to create a new school uniform it made sense to engage the services of a fashion designer and to use the same model of student clients that had worked so well for the Tallis Graphics project. Professor Helen Storey recommended Alina Brieul Moat, a recent graduate of the London School of Fashion's Ethical Fashion MA course. Alina proved to be an inspired collaborator since our primary aim in the design of the new uniform was to make sure that it had as little negative impact on the environment and on the lives of industry workers as possible.
Check out the video opposite and the full story of the project on the Tallis Uniform blog. |
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - Tangled Feet at Tallis
For the last three years Tangled Feet theatre company have been artists in residence during the summer term at Tallis. Kat Joyce, co-director of the company, was a student at Tallis in the 90s and her father Tim taught Drama here and was a respected Pastoral Leader. As a national School of Creativity we set out three years ago to promote a variety of approaches to creative learning, responding to our imminent move to a new building as a primary catalyst. Having performed their piece ‘Home’ and devised a site specific performance with our students about notions of place and belonging in 2009, last year saw the company conduct their research and development for The Measurement Shop at Tallis. The resulting performance used a range of mathematical and statistical techniques for measuring the seemingly unquantifiable: How hopeful are we? How do we feel about the new building?
The partnership with Tangled Feet reached an amazing climax this year in our collaboration on a new show All That Is Solid Melts Into Air which was performed at the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival and at a special show in school: London’s story is an epic and perpetual tale of regeneration and change. Ships have sailed, bombs have fallen, tower blocks have soared and markets plummeted. The past is wiped away and new futures promised. How does a city survive when as all that is solid melts into air? What does it take to let go of the past when the future is still out of reach? The collaboration began with a series of specialist physical theatre workshops for all Year 9 students. The week ended with a remarkable pop up performance during which members of Tangled Feet clambered across the school roof dressed as builders apparently measuring the building for demolition. However, their equipment and bizarre dialogue quickly alerted the audience gathered below to the absurd nature of their actions: “Hold on, hold on. I was a bit off. It was 37 light years and 2 months!” |
The performers used a long roll of red tape that ultimately stretched from one end of the school, where the new building is slowly growing, to the other like an artery or umbilical cord.
The next phase of the project involved a visit to the Three Mills rehearsal studios for a group of 40 students to work with the company on devising the end of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. We arrived to discover a huge scaffold and stage rigged with a series of pulleys that looked like it belonged on a building site. The show explores the experience of urban regeneration on a community of people. With minimal dialogue but a whole repertoire of physical movements, the performers describe a variety of responses to a landscape in flux. The students’ role in the last 10 minutes of the show is to colonise what appears to be an empty and derelict block of flats and breath life back into the place. This involved learning a very complex piece of choreography and getting to grips with decorating the huge structure with foam and hazard tape. The students worked magnificently and impressed the adults with their enthusiasm and perseverance. The show was eventually performed to packed audiences in the Greenwich + Docklands Festival in July 2011. These were remarkable events, which tested the students’ resilience and support for one another. This is how one theatre critic described the show’s ending: Finally, we’re shot back into the present, and the performers become a group of kids who swarm over the structure...It’s strongly influenced by parkour, and it’s infused with a sense of delight, energy and an appreciation of the structures we’re able to create. As the performers dance and play, kids from Thomas Tallis run onto the site and join them, clapping and jumping and dancing a routine (to great celebratory music by Nick Gill) in loosely synchronised fashion. They have bunches of striped construction site tape in their hands and they pull it through the crowd like streamers, and attach it to the scaffolding so that eventually the performance structure resembles some festival arena or mad parade float. From a review by Corinne Salisbury in the British Theatre Guide Finally, despite the inclement weather, the scaffold and show transferred to the concourse at Thomas Tallis School for two triumphant performances seen by students, staff, ex colleagues, ex students, parents and friends. The evening show in particular proved to be a very emotional affair as we honoured the building that has inspired so much creativity over the years with an amazing show accompanied by a barbecue and performances from a variety of student bands. The school building, which was constructed on the site of an old RAF base and sits next to one of the largest regeneration projects in the UK, provided a perfect setting for the show. The summer has provided many opportunities for our community to bid farewell to the existing school building but few more poignant than this. |
Click here to see a set of photographs of both the Greenwich + Docklands and Thomas Tallis School performances of the show.
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Tangled Feet Theatre Company in residence
This film tells the story of a week long residency by Tangled Feet Theatre Company at Tallis in July 2009. The work was commissioned by young people on the Creative Tallis Action Research Group following a long period of research and reflection about creative learning. The group felt that it would be interesting to begin to think about our move to a new school (scheduled for September 2011) and reflect on the emotional and psychological issues around moving home. Tangled Feet are co-directed by an ex Tallis student, Kat Joyce, and had created a play entitled "Home" which has been touring the country in a range of alternative venues. We wanted to see if a theatre company comprised of Tallis students and the Tangled Feet actors and technicians could work collaboratively for a week to create a series of interventions in the building designed to provoke thoughts and ideas about physical and emotional spaces.
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 We decided to make a mini website about the residency using the excellent Wix.
We are very proud of the students from Years 7 to 13 who took part in the project and especially those members of the ARG who helped to commission and co-ordinate the entire process. They displayed a real maturity and sense of ownership of the learning journey that will hopefully have provided them with a memorable experience and range of transferable skills. |
"All in all, great congratulations should go to the ARG, for their courage in managing a very experimental piece, the school for allowing it to go ahead and have these seemingly random things going on, and the performers for incredible application and focus. I've worked with schools for over 20 years, and I can think of very few, if any, that have the staff, students and outlook to pull off something like this."
John Riches, Creative Agent
John Riches, Creative Agent
Our most recent collaboration with Professor Helen Storey involved creating a series of learning resources related to the fantastic "Wonderland" project. Alex Gibbons (Science) and Kate Hawkins (DT) explored the ideas in collaboration with their students, devising a sequence of activities that are available for anyone to access on the Wonderland Education website. The students got to grips with the science of polymerisation, explored the ethical and environmental issues related to mass produced plastics and designed their own weird polymers. As well as approaching both the science and design technology concepts in an inter-disciplinary way, using new technologies to reflect on what they had learned, the students were invited to the public exhibition of Wonderland at the London College of Fashion to present the experience of their learning to students and teachers from across the country.
Discover more about our other collaborations with the Helen Storey Foundation (Teacher Exchange and Eye & I) on the cross-curricular creativity page.
Discover more about our other collaborations with the Helen Storey Foundation (Teacher Exchange and Eye & I) on the cross-curricular creativity page.