May 29, 30 & 31: #the artOfcommunity FREE Festival
A virtual event with real people. It was off the scale, and not to worry if you missed it. It’s all on video on our YouTube Channel, Twitter and Facebook pages!
Live and Direct from Eden Project*
It was a weekend of Inspiring Talks, Uplifting Performances, Creative Activities and Community Engagement.
Pretend
Checkout the full program here.
THE EVENT WAS STREAMED ON OUR TWITTER AND FACEBOOK CHANNELS
MORE INFO ON our facebook page here!
IN A NUTSHELL
Following on from our #ARTCONNECTS19 Year, as you can see in the film below, we had a massive #COLLABORATE20 year lined up inspired by a chat with Nile Rodgers no less, and a virus ain’t gonna stop us now (that wasn’t one of his was songs was it?)
We’re all artists, they can lock us in, but they’ll never lock us down.
It’s all part of our #CommunityLockIn and will consist of the following:
1st May: Parliament* launch - With special guests INFO
5th May: #GetCreativeAtHome Pop-Up - Belfast, Northern Ireland
6th May: #GetCreativeAtHome Pop-Up - Glasgow, Scotland
7th May: #GetCreativeAtHome Pop-Up - With Caine Monroy on Caine’s Arcade fame in Cardiff
8th May - The #ARTofVEDAY - a very special day
9-16th May: #GetCreativeAtHome Pop-Ups - 7 Popup’s across the UK as part of Voluntary Arts’ National Get Creative Festival - see below for all the dates
TBC May: EdTech event - Celebrating, Sharing and Connecting Parents and Teachers on home schooling
13th May: Decolonising the Music Curriculum - Conference with Jimmy Rotheram, Nitin Sawhney, Winnie Greer and others.
20th: #GetCreativeAtHome Pop-Up - Brighton, a collaboration with our friends at the seaside who sadly had to wind in their festival
23rd May : Creative Careers Day - a day of inspiring careers talks and inspiration from Academy St James’ Primary in Bradford
24th May: Hey Kids Book Fest - A One Day Children’s Literature Festival in Hay on Wye
29-31st May: The #ARTofCOMMUNITY Festival - a weekend of our, your, their art (whatever it is) with a Little Big Lunch Street party on Sunday
*The Parliament event is a Pretend Parliament vent via the wonders of tech
Click the image to hear Nick explaining it to Jamie East on Talk RADIO
We’ll have web pages soon for each of the above but for now see below for details of the Pop-Ups Tour and to see if we’re coming to your village, town or city this time. If not, put a request in and we’ll try to come later in the lock-in. None of us are going anywhere in a hurry.
Either way sign up here for updates and to be part of it
And check out the film below of the school launch of our #COLLABORATE20 Year, LIVE ON BBC Radio from Bearwood Primary in Poole, Dorset. (You can hear the whole piece here)
AIMING HIGHER THAN HIGH
Did you see our ‘appearance’ on BBC Breakfast on 1st April?
It’s ambitious and might not work, but if there was ever a time to teach our kids by example, to teach them to #AimHigherThanHigh, to find their passion, their art, it’s now.
We’ve applied for an emergency Arts Council England grant to help pay our costs and those of the artists we’ll hire in on the tour and festival weekend as well as to give a few interns some invaluable experience.
One thing’s for sure, we wouldn’t be here without one organisation, LGfL (the company that provides not only internet connectivity for London’s schools and now more and more of the UK’s) but also inspiring curriculum materials and creative tools.
They’ve helped us build our #CommunityLockIn - a Content Creation and Community Collaboration TV Studio which, as if by magic, let’s us teleport anywhere from main stage at Glastonbury to Caravanserai at Camp Bestival or the Design Museum, an Amazing Robot Driven Warehouse or a Loo Roll Factory. Yes, ANYWHERE!!!
See their CEO John Jackson, chatting here with our dad in residence, co-founder and CEO Nick Corston or click the logo to see how they are collaborating as a lead partner with the Department of Education, helping schools across the UK at this time.
WE’VE DONE IT BEFORE. WE’LL DO IT AGAIN
We were inspired to start STEAM Co. after a visit to Camp Bestival and go back every year.
STEAM Co. was co-founded by a bunch of parents, teachers, businesses and other creative carers to bring that vibe back to our own kids’ school and for the last five years we’ve been taking it to school communities across the UK since we set up as a non-profit community enterprise.
The Parliament launch event for our #ARTCONNECTS19 Festival
Every summer we go on a tour of the UK - from Cornwall to Carlisle and like to kick them off in style, with launch events in Parliament and nothing’s going to stop us doing it again this year, one way or another.
We have the biggest room in the House reserved - Committee Room 14. And there are 200 seats up for grabs and they go on sale at 7pm Monday April 27th) with 150 free ones.
The rest of you will have to watch via our video feeds on big screens outside in Parliament Square.
So sign up now to part of it, we need artists and speakers in all the towns we’re visiting as well as acts for the closing weekend Festival
The #GetCreativeATHOME Pop-Up Tour
Eight stops across the UK - our contribution to the #GetCreativeAt Home Festival (Click date for more info)
Sat 9th May - Bude, Cornwall
Sun 10th May - Glastonbury, Somerset
Mon 11th May - Cowes, Isle of Wight
Tues 12th May - Liverpool, Merseyside
Weds 13th May - Newcastle, Tyneside
Thurs 14th May - Ludlow, Shropshire
Fri 15th May - Leeds, Yorkshire
Sat 16th May - Oxford, Oxfordshire
Sun 17th May - Brent, London
DON’T WORRY IF we don’t visit your area this time, if this plane flies we’ll do this all summer so be sure to Sign Up HERE now to ask us to visit your School Community so you can be PART of it and celebrate YOUR ART and help connect YOUR COMMUNITY.
A PACKED DAY OF ACTIVITIES
Each Pop-Up Day of the Tour will consist of the following programme of events:
10am: Rocket Kids Club briefing - an hour long TV show where we’ll set an Art Challenge for Kids and their Creative Carers - it might be the #ARTofCARDBOARD, or the #ARTofCODING, the #ARTofCODING or the #ARTofBOOKS
2pm: Rocket Kids Club review - a 30 minute TV show where we’ll look at what everyone did and get a few kids on live
3-5pm: ARTCONNECTS show - a 2 hour TV Show chatting about Creativity in Schools, Work and Lives in the area we’re visiting
#DanceConnects - every afternoon at drive time as we hit the road, we’ll hand over our air waves to a local DJ to give us a few tunes to end the day with and accompany us on our drive to the next stop on our tour, Know anyone who might be up for it.
Local Creatives - We hope to get funding to pay for performances by local creatives each day of the tour. While we’re all artists, a creative is someone whose art is their livelihood and they’ve been especially hard hit by Covid-19, so we do hope we get the Arts Council grant we’ve applied for for all this.
Design your logo and get a photo of you holding it to share on Social Media with the text
#MyArt is…
#ILoveArt because…
I’m part of the #UKArtTakeover in our #CommunityLockIn
Join the #CreativityRevolution
Print it in Black and White and put it in your window
Better still, get it printed as big as you can afford. Maybe even poster size by sticking lots of A4 prints together like this or send it off before midday to those lovely folks at Solopress here who will print it on a monster A0 poster and send it back to you the next day for under twenty quid (select ‘bond’ paper, not gloss).
You could even get some stickers too - you can get 500 for £30. Here’s the link to the 37mm round ones we use. And here’s the artwork to use. We’ll do a full tutorial video on this this week.
Maybe get one for everyone in your community, rent a drone pilot and co-create a community artwork like Academy St James did last summer as you can see in the film below.
See a few of our films here and sign up here for updates