The summer school began when the two groups met on a trip to Manchester International Festival, to see the international premiere of Wonder.land by Damon Albarn. This inspirational trip was followed up with another trip into Manchester to the Art Gallery, where they worked in one of their studios using physical materials and digital methods to create themes and images for the show. Then they went to the open day at the Bridgewater Hall, tried out instruments, toured the building and had the chance to conduct part of the Halle Orchestra!

“When we went to Manchester Art Gallery we like got a word and we had to find pictures that summed that up – like the Prison Yard, and Like me and Leo found one, and it was like really foggy, like pirates on a ship.”

After the fun the rest of the summer school was at Hope Valley College music department, where the hard work began – with just a week to create their finished show!

“You had to writing bits with the instruments and people were singing it.”

“Yeah – we did the whole run through and it was actually great!”

Click here to see how it went!

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Tall Tales 2015 launched in April on Tuesdays at the Fairfield Dreamscheme in Buxton and on Wednesdays at the Gamesley Community Café.

More than 35 young people from the two estates have taken part, with 20 coming together for the summer school at the beginning of August.
The young participants have picked up new musical skills in the first workshops and then brought them together in song writing, drama and set design with our team of professional performing arts practitioners. They have worked with composer and instrumentalist, Andy Smith, song writer and digital musician, Caro Churchill, song writer and poet, Lucy Jackson, opera singer, Daisy Barker, instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, Aidan Jolly and music technologist and sample maker, Kristian Gjerstad. Then later on drama practitioner, Paul Hine and digital artist, Andrea Pazos joined in to create the other elements of a performance!

“I think my favourite session was the part where, me Ruby and Jack and Jess and her friend, we did like a song and it’s got like a hand clap in it, like a little beat with our hands, and we did it all ourselves with a bit of help from Caro, and then like we keep on getting the tune wrong, but then we soon got used to it, and then we had to perform it to everyone – and we were just like facing the table to not look at everyone, and some people was just videoing each group, and like yeah it was okay and so we were trying to think of a part for where Ruby could play flute in, but it didn’t actually quite fit…”

“I remember that I worked with Kristian, I brought my violin and we made all noises and made sounds, so when we did that, he put them on this cardboard piece attached to this wire, so when we press it it plays our sound we made.”

Next they all go on to meet at the Summer School and create the final show!

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