The third year of Tall Tales has unsettled audiences in Buxton’s Poole’s Cavern with a journey into Poole’s Cavern they won’t forget…
Young performers from Glossop and Buxton welcomed the audience to their book launch, only for proceedings to be interrupted by the book’s contents disappearing back into the cave where it came from! Luckily the assembled public were willing to help find the characters and get the book back on sale. Setting out in four search parties they entered the cave to find the Water Goddess, the Fire Goddess, ghosts, bats, Roman soldiers and a Bronze Age man and at the very foot a medium trying to communicate (badly) with the former inhabitants of the cave.
When they met NoName they found someone forced into the limelight and shrinking from the crowds attracted to the book launch. He was so uncertain of his place in the world he couldn’t take part, taking all the characters with him. But along the way the audience had found letters which seemed to hold a clue, and together they worked out his name. Back at the visitors’ centre everyone called for Norman and he returned to take up his new identity. With all the characters gathered around him he found that “True friends will always be there for you!”
A cast of 22 performed to a sell out audience, with people coming from across the High Peak… And here is a first peek at what it looked like:
The young people from Glossop and Buxton created the show during a 6 day Summer School. Now in its third year, Tall Tales is High Peak Community Arts’ performing arts programme for young people across the district. Each year the project starts in April with evening creative sessions in Gamesley and Fairfield. People can come along to try new skills in musical instruments, vocals, writing or music production, and they sign up for the August Summer School.
In the first two years of the project we worked from published books to create the show. In 2014 audiences saw Blue John, from the book by Berlie Doherty, and in 2015 we staged 100% Wolf by Jayne Lyons. But now the young members of the project have demanded they create their own story, and so we launched the Young Writers’ Camp in April 2016, where young people from all our projects and others from Manchester came together to be inspired at Poole’s Cavern. They created characters and stories to fill our Young Writers’ Camp Collection, ‘Mind Your Head’. Tall Tales has been working with these ideas ever since and now they have been able to set their show back in the caves that inspired it!
This year Tall Tales has been funded by Arts Council England, the Derbyshire Music Education Hub, Derbyshire County Council and Buxton Festival. For more information contact Sophie at High Peak Community Arts on 01663 744516 or sophie@highpeakarts.org
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!
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!
More than 35 young people from the two estates have taken part, with 20 coming together for the 
“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.”
