Author: Nicola

Voice Arts Trust has been invited to travel to the Cook Islands to deliver a devised theatre project with young people at risk of exclusion in the educational environment. This project will happen in September over an intensive nine day period.  We will also be running a number of professional development workshops for those working within inclusive education.

This community engagement performance project is designed to connect, celebrate and surprise your community. It brings together people from a range of diverse agencies and organisations that work with and for community. They are staff, volunteers, and clients.  They are guided and supported to create a collection of one-minute stories inspired by their own life and their work in the community. Engaging, surprising, and challenging audiences can expect the unexpected when they come to an In A Minute performance – it is intimate and thoroughly unique. We are delivering this project in Hutt with support from the Hutt City Council.

This project is a series of workshops with community volunteers from City Housing.  The focus is on speaking publicly and presentation skills. For many volunteers speaking to groups of people is part of their role in the community, and it is a challenge for the best of us at the best of times. We will be building confidence, capacity and skills in this area, and preparing some participants to present at the annual Neighbours Day celebrations.

Thanks to funding from the Hutt City Council, Voice Arts Trust is developing a number of community and workplace creative engagement projects. If your group or organisation is interested please email claire@voice-arts.org.nz

The first half of this year we will be working with our Tenant drama group to create a performance exploring the theme “Who Are We!” We will be using spoken word, drama and song to capture stories that explore blood lines, ancestors, those who have gone before.  The group will be performing for the wider community as part of Matariki celebrations.

The cast of ‘He Aha Te Utu – The True Cost’ performed for the first time in front of a packed audience at Parliament. The response was overwhelming, the audience deeply moved by this powerful, unique devised theatre work.  A compact 23 minutes, this performance piece explores the role of women in WW1. We thank our partners on this project – the British Council and the Goethe-Institut. We have additional support from the Wellington City Council to tour this performance. If you are interested in booking this show for your work or community group, please email: claire@voice-arts.org.nz

Click here to watch a short documentary about our community volunteer project. See our facilitators in action and hear from the participants about their experience of Voice Arts Trust.

Working in partnership with the CAP Team at City Housing, we are creating a tenant theatre company – an open group for any city housing tenants with a burning desire for, or gentle curiosity about performance art. Having worked over the years with a number of city housing tenants on various projects, we know there’s a huge wealth of creative talent out there and we intend harnessing that talent on and off stage.  The Company will be perform twice a year – a fun family show for Christmas and a devised theatre production mid year.

The culmination of our storytelling project with older City Housing tenants was the premiere of …’my memories of home…’ a short film capturing the storytelling and musical talents of our 9 participants. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive. This film now plays to the pubic as part of the visitor experience at the Colonial Cottage. To view the film click here. Thanks to our partners on this project – Community Action Programme, City Housing, Wellington City Council and Wellington Museum.

It was a leap of faith for the 25 Community Room Coordinators (CRC) we began working with back in September 2014. We were asking them to get creative but we just didn’t know what the collection of all that creativity would finally look like. But now we do! A stunning book and DVD holds this unique collection of poems, art, story, song and film. Especially significant is the documentary that sits along side the collection that follows the project’s development.  CRC Bruce Hurley holds his copy!