Re-enchanting the Landscape aims to enable children and young people through play and activity, to connect with both the landscape which they inhabit, and also the rich cultural traditions that are caught up with that landscape. Our purpose is to prove to a Second Life generation that there are more ways of experiencing ‘other worlds’ than the computer screen!
We offer a number of workshops that combine traditional craftwork, with storytelling, in a way that is designed to enrich the child or young person’s experience of each. When one remembers either artefacts such as the Bayeux Tapestry or the allegorical stone carving upon cathedrals, it is clear that this combination of activity and tale is a very old one. What is certain now, is that weaving at once words and willow, opens up the mind, allowing memory a greater potency, and in so doing making sense of the frequently repetitive actions involved in craftwork.
Our emphasis on the craftwork is on rural, sustainable and recycled crafts. The materials we use are either immediately at hand in the landscape or stuff that might otherwise have been thrown away. Likewise the stories we tell will have a strong link to the landscape be that through location or local history. We aim to show how one can, though imagination, transform the humdrum spaces of the everyday life, into a landscape rich in resources, activities, and resonant in the imagination.
Tall Sticks and Tall Tales
In this workshop participants are introduced to the memory stick as a method to remember a story. The same basic story will be told in various ways and moods. Each participant will then be encouraged to think how they might want to tell the story, and shown how to construct a memory stick as an aide memoir for their own particular version of it, which depending on time, they will then perform to their fellow participants, singly or in groups depending on the story.
Although the workshops are suitable for all ages above eight, we are particularly interested in working with teenagers, who are frequently excluded from the activity loop, and abandoned to those stories they can glean from computers and the television.
Current Workshops (each workshop takes 2-3 hours).
All our workshops are highly interactive, and are aimed to encourage not only memory and skill with hand and eye, but also social interaction between participants. Moreover each workshop will involve various different activities, and each activity will itself have differing degrees of complexity, allowing each child to very much find their own level.
A Festival in Crafts and Stories
Most of the great festivals by which the passage of the year was marked (such as Beltane, Midsummer or All Hallows) had both stories and rural crafts associated with them. Participants in this workshop will be encouraged to make something using these crafts, while they are told a sequence of stories associated with the time of year. (Click here to see details of recent calendar based workshops.)
Landscape as Stage
In this workshop a landscape, which could be either park or school playing field is transformed into a temporary performance venue. Participants are shown how the simplest of landscape interventions can transform a space, opening it out to the imagination, and to storytelling. The nature and permanence of such interventions can vary. The landscape constructed could either not outlast the workshop or could, if desired become a more lasting or, if there was funding, permanent feature.
Plots and Props
In this workshop, participants will both be shown how to make a prop (such as a mask or sword) for a performance and then shown how one might use that prop within a storytelling itself. The workshop will end with a full storytelling performance, in which the audience will (hopefully) participate.
Re-enchanting the Landscape
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Activities for after school clubs and regular meetings.
As well as offering the above workshops, we are also available to clubs and schools on a more ‘regular basis’, and are always happy to discuss how we might fit our activities within any existing programme of events (or click here to see the kind of things we have done) .
