Future Visions - a participatory video project connecting the arts, science and conservation
Organisation
The Grange Festival, United Kingdom
The Grange Festival is a recently-founded summer opera festival based in Hampshire (UK). The Festival’s education programme, Learning@TheGrange, works with local schools and communities to give young people the opportunity to express themselves through a broad range of expressive arts, with a particular focus on devising. The programme operates year-round with the aim of reaching out to young people and adults who don’t have access to the arts, taking workshops out into the community while encouraging participants to attend world class productions and experience theatre for themselves.
Project
Future Visions was a collaboration between Learning@TheGrange and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in which participants were asked to express their hopes and ideas for a sustainable future. Musical compositions and choreography devised by participants were filmed and illustrated with WWF footage to create 10 short video clips.
https://thegrangefestival.co.uk/learning-at-the-grange/future-visions/
Participants
250 young people from 10 local schools, community choirs and education institutions.
Project outcomes
10 three-minute videos that were shared online, covered by national television and screened at international events, including the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26).
A format that provided young people with a creative voice and WWF with a new platform to share their message.
An opportunity to highlight the role of artistic creativity both in tackling big challenges as well as a life skill.
Context
In the lead-up to COP26, WWF challenged young people to reflect on how the world would look if humanity succeeds in overcoming current environmental challenges and learns to live in harmony with nature. The Learning@TheGrange team originally intended Future Visions to culminate in a performance piece, but switched to a video format due to Covid-19 restrictions that made it impossible to bring together 250 people on stage.
Approach
The team reached out to education institutions in socially challenging areas of Basingstoke alongside the Hampshire County Youth Orchestra and county choir. Participants from each of the 10 institutions involved were offered two and a half days of interactive workshops that combined an online presentation by WWF of their assigned topic (urban nature in our cities, the vast grasslands of the African Masai Mara and the rich biodiversity in the Amazon Rainforest, among others) with discussions and debates led by the Learning@TheGrange creative team. Participants examined information provided by WWF, explored possible solutions and developed a vision for the future that they illustrated with lyrics, music and choreography. Their work was filmed and edited by an external production company.
Results
The project theme was felt to be highly relevant and attracted widespread press and social media attention, including national television coverage. Susan Hamilton, Director of Learning, believes that the project not only elevated the profile of the Learning@TheGrange programme, but also generated discussion around the need for collaboration between arts and science organisations, highlighting the importance of creativity as a life skill.
Feedback from partners and participants, provided both spontaneously and via evaluation forms, was very positive. Participants included young people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as performers, and whose interest in the performing arts was reinvigorated as a result. The project also offered space for creative learning that is no longer provided by the national curriculum.
Future Visions was the Festival’s first digital project, and has helped raise awareness of the potential of creative digital work within the organisation. Susan looks forward to getting learners more involved in the actual filming process in future projects and exploring video-making as a creative skill. The project furthermore highlighted the importance and value of devising for engaging creatively with participants.
Lessons learned:
“Bize-sized” video outputs help foster engagement. The Future Visions videos were all under three minutes in length, which made them ideal for social media engagement.
Devised work with an external film crew comes with specific challenges. Susan Hamilton recommends collaborating with a production company that has prior experience filming co-creation projects and taking the time to ask lots of questions and find out how the film crew works, as the unpredictable nature of devised work adds complexity to the filming process.
Solid partnerships are key. Strong relationships with local organisations foster the trust and flexibility needed to implement brave projects and adapt processes when needed.