ARTS
18 - 25? Looking to make a piece of theatre that could be inspired by 2012?
Applications are now invited for the third round of No Strings Attached - a grant scheme for young theatre makers aged 18-25. Grants of up to £1000 are available for young people to make a piece of theatre or to explore new ideas. To apply you need to phone Jane McGibbon on 01252 745412 to discuss your project and register your application. You will then be invited to present your idea to a panel of arts professionals and young people. The next panel will meet on Wed 23 July at Theatre Royal Brighton and the deadline for applications is 15 July . Successful applicants receive their funding within 10 days of the panel and are also paired up with a professional mentor. There will then be one further and final deadline of this September, so get creating..!
Please follow this link for more details of the No Strings Attached scheme (pdf)
August 24th - Handover Day
In order to as widely as possible celebrate the Handover Day, London 2012 are now offering a London 2012 Handover Flag to all manner of cultural venues and/or venues staging something imaginative on August 24th. If you think this could be you and you would like a flag to form part of your event or your day, please contact Caterina Loriggio at CaterinaLoriggio@seeda.co.uk as soon as possible, with details of your plans.
2012 Olympic and Paralympic Handover and Launch Events - South East- Options for Regional Events
London 2012 has a real desire to make 24 August and 17 September great days on the road to the London 2012 Games as we celebrate the Handover moments from Beijing to London & the UK. These will be swiftly followed by the Cultural Olympiad Launch weekend, 26 – 28 September. You are encouraged to join in one or all of these events in any inspiring way you see fit. Do make the best use of regional resources, be as idiosyncratic as you please, do be inspired.
Key dates for 2008
| Date | Activity |
|---|---|
| Sunday 24 August | Handover Ceremony at the Closing of the Beijing Olympic Games Theme: Celebration |
| Wednesday 17 September | Handover Ceremony at the Closing of the Beijing Paralympic Games Theme: Education |
| Friday 26 – Sunday 28 September | Cultural Olympiad Launch Weekend Theme: Participation |
Olympic Handover Day, Sunday 24 August - Celebration
After inviting the billions of people watching the Handover event around the world to join us in London and the UK for 2012, we want to turn the attention of the UK onto its own party to celebrate becoming the Olympic hosts. In London, major events in the centre of the city will have tens of thousands watching the Closing Ceremony on screens and enjoying a mixture of music and activity which will be reflected on TV.
This will provide the framework for events UK-wide. Sunday 24 August is one of the great holiday weekends in the English calendar. It is a day when fetes, festivals and carnivals take place; when music and cultural activity mixes with sport in high summer; when athletics, cricket and football mix it on the sports fields; when carnivals and melas spring up from Notting Hill to the four corners of the UK. So London 2012 wants to mark that day in similar vein. It wants to offer to all a chance to engage, whether in back garden, in major city centre, on the beach or in the park and is suggesting a mixture of opportunity which might be expressed as follows:
- Create your own celebratory event at whatever level suits. For a council, it might be an afternoon of large-scale activity in the heart of the town or city (a carnival parade, a fun run, both combined?), how about free access to gyms and leisure centres that whole day; a street or village might host a party, an arts and sports day or how about a foods of the world market or picnic?; individually you might have a family barbeque or organise a supper safari with your neighbours or friends.
- If you already have an event planned can you create a section that celebrates London & the UK becoming the next Olympic Games hosts? It could be a stage in a festival or carnival; it might be moments during your event when you feature the Handover; it might be adding a sporting element to a cultural event or vice versa.
- Engender or take part in a civic moment – each Local Authority is going to be given a Handover Flag to create and build a local ceremony around. How fun can make you this? Can the flag arrive on a boat or open top bus filled with local celebrities, local heroes, local young people? Can you devise a large scale international event delivered by the many nationalities within your local community parading their own flags and celebrating their cultures? Or will you invite communities from your twin town to take over your streets for the day?
Whatever you do make sure you celebrate the Olympic values of friendship, respect and endeavour but don’t be afraid to be irreverent. All of the above can take place concurrently with the Closing Ceremony in Beijing from lunchtime (1pm) onwards, with the Handover Flag and Music celebrations following the end of the Closing Ceremony roughly around 3.45 pm.
Another of London 2012’s initiatives is the development of partnerships with cities and towns and the BBC to set up what are known as Live Sites. These are large-scale public screens in town centres which will provide focal points for celebrations throughout the Cultural Olympiad. In the South East our first permanent Live Site will be installed in Portsmouth. We also hope to have a temporary Live Site in the east of the region for Handover Day.
The Handover Flag Moment
Never before has one moment of ceremony linked all corners of the UK in this way. A range of British places - every local authority; major national institution; exciting and interesting landscape – as well as interests abroad all will join together on Sunday 24 August to raise a flag.The specific elements of this ‘first’ will be outlined in a letter soon to be received by organisations listed above but the essential principles are that this activity is designed to provide a way of joining in the national celebrations in a local way.
If you represent such an organisation and have any queries, you can contact Bruno Peek on brunopeek@mac.com
Points to note include:1. a ‘Handover Flag’ is being created which marks the date of Olympic Handover 2. every local authority will be invited to raise it at the same time3. we hope that Mayors or similar figures will invite local young people to assist4. it should be a natural moment for aspiring "2012 sporting hopefuls" in your area 5. past Olympians and significant sporting figures will feature6. likewise, cultural and arts figures and personalities are welcome7. the Handover flag is yours to keep and use or display
Sing the Nation
Another opportunity for every nation and region of the UK will take place through the Live Sites.
Working with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), Sing the Nation is delivering a programme of workshop-led activities in August designed to create a musical moment for all in the Handover Day. This will be an open programme available to all and we hope local arts officers and organisations will offer this to individuals as well as choirs and ensembles. You can organise your own singing event even if you do not have a Live Site; for example, do you want to hoist your Handover flag on a ship whilst singing sea shanties followed by a fish supper?
At the heart of this activity is the aim to animate your town or city centre with music, by turning the audiences into choirs themselves through animateurs and individuals in the assembled throng. All you’ll need on the day is an event with an audience and a PA system……the rest just happens!Sing The Nation will make contact with specific Live Site cities in the next few weeks. For all others, the resources to engage with your event will be available in………
Resource Packs
For Organisers of local events at all levels, we intend to develop an online package that will offer support as required in the period from June to August. It’s likely that a more general participants pack will also be available immediately before the event through media outlets.Content is likely to include:
- event staging advice musical content for the Sing The Nation moment materials to help support your event
- publicity & registration details
We hope this will help to create participation and that you will, in turn, register your event so that we can add you to the public list to spread the word about your Handover event.
If you want to know more about Sing the Nation then please contact: Colette Hiller on colette@singlondon.org
Paralympic Handover Ceremony - Education
On Wednesday 17 September the Paralympic Handover Ceremony will be the major focus for a second project which will reach out to every community through young people and specifically through education routes. On this day London 2012 will launch its Education Programme – an outline for this will be made available on June 16.
You can find further information about the London 2012 Education Programme at www.london2012.com/get-involved/education . Kathryn McColl, Education Officer for London 2012, will be visiting the South East on July 8 to talk to schools, colleges, universities and policy makers about the opportunities.
The ceremony will follow roughly the same timetable as the Olympic Games (with Handover expected at approximately 2.30pm); the format is similar and London 2012 will mark it in the same way. Stephen Powell is directing both ceremonies and he is using the same artistic cast in both. The opportunities throughout the UK will be distributed widely over the coming months and we hope that it will give a real chance to celebrate in a way specific to these Games which Stoke Mandeville created in 1948. We are very proud in the South East of all that Stoke Mandeville has done; celebrating their achievement and finding inspiration in it will be at the core of our Cultural Olympiad and our Legacy Trust programme – Accentuate. We would therefore also encourage you to mark this occasion.
You may want to organise something special during or after school hours or you might want to get local under-graduates or FE or HE institutions to organise something to underline the Education focus. However, outside of an education context, you may want to create an extraordinary event led by deaf and disabled artists, film makers, cultural providers or fully involve the disabled community in a specially devised celebration. We are hoping to launch our Accentuate programme that day and are currently making plans for what this might look like.
Cultural Olympiad Handover Weekend – Participate
The aim of Cultural Olympiad is to show that London 2012 is about more than just 5 weeks of fantastic sport. The launch weekend, September 26 – 28, kicks off a four year celebration of our cultures, on a scale that has not been attempted before, designed to enable the widest range of people across the UK to take part.
The launch weekend will also launch a number of the Cultural Olympiad Major projects. We will not only get content detail but also a timeline for these projects illustrating how they will be played out during the four years. We do not have confirmation of which projects will be announced that weekend but it is likely to be: Stories of the World, 2012 Sounds, Artists Taking the Lead, Extraordinary Ability and Young Futures. After the launch weekend it will become clearer how we can get involved and play our part in the Cultural Olympiad.
The weekend will also begin the Cultural Olympiad awareness campaign for the public. We want the general public to understand what it is all about, find out how, where and when they can get involved and build personal interest, growing to widespread national understanding over the four year period. Consequently we will help promote any activity taking place over this weekend. It will open up creative opportunities for individuals, communities, organisations, boroughs, cities, counties. It is our chance to open up and try something new and different, to enable inspiring cultural activity to reach more people in often unexpected places, to think differently about the Olympics and Paralympics and to present ourselves to the world in a variety of different ways, which represent the creative UK. This has led to two specific themes, Open Up and Light Up.
Open Up
The aim is to open up opportunities for people across the UK to get involved in imaginative, thought-provoking creative activities they may not have done before. Cultural groups and organisations are encouraged to work together to do something unusual, open up different spaces, provide opportunities for people to try something new, or offer free or discounted tickets to events.
Examples might be: opening up part of your collection normally in storage, organising workshops or seminars so people can better understand your work, open house events such as tours of the Town Hall or Mayor’s House – places that the public cannot usually access, devising special trails in woodlands or across natural landscape, free taster sessions or classes, opening up rehearsals to the public, staying open longer or at unusual times, organising something unusual in your space or building.
Light Up
The aim is that people will know the 2012 journey has started over that weekend without having to go inside a cultural building – many people are not familiar with how close they are to a cultural or sporting venue. It will act as a visual marker for the weekend, repeated over the course of 4 years.
A variety of buildings and other spaces around the UK will 'present themselves' in one of the London 2012 brand colours – you may want to do the same? Other e xamples might be: a light art installation, staying open late or throughout the night (therefore keeping your lights on), fireworks, film making, coloured gels in your windows, lantern processions, digital or web based work, can you get everyone in your area to light up their mobile ‘phones at the same with a special message/screening? Use this opportunity to highlight low energy lighting or alternative sources of power.
We would like to see people in the South East of England light their coastal and millennium beacons over this weekend. We are currently discussing a lead town for this to give the cue, will get back to you with dates and times once this has been agreed. Mean time do let Caterina Loriggio, the Creative Programmer, know if you can get involved in this way. You may contact Caterina at: c.loriggio@culturesoutheast.org.uk
Hidden Treasures Film Archive Project
Screen South has developed a film heritage idea inspired by Open Up and Light Up to engage the public in activities across the South East for the Cultural Olympiad Launch. We will be inviting the public to bring out their old films from under the bed or out of the attic – open up the boxes and light up their films on screens in village halls, community centres and cinema screens.
It will be a real insight to see their personal stories up on a big screen for the first time. We will compliment this local activity by inviting those public archives, cultural centres, museums, libraries, academic institutions, stately homes, who hold rarely seen fascinating film archives, to open up their doors and invite the public in to see their treasures in a unique setting. The UK Film Council who, in principle, is supportive of the idea being linked in with their new regional archive access programme may be able to support Screen South by providing some seed funding to kick start the initiative. The idea is at very early stages of discussion, but these early discussions are getting a very warm reaction. We are in the process of drawing up an activity and marketing plan and will seek to engage a regional steering group to lead the programme.
Screen South would be happy to discuss the idea with those who feel they could contribute something positive and imaginative. They will be calling a meeting in early June to take the idea forward with key stakeholders and partners. Please let Jo Nolan know if you or any other partners would like to attend - jo.nolan@screensouth.org
Open Space
We will be running an Open Space event shortly after launch weekend for the South East’s cultural providers to get together to discuss both the Cultural Olympiad and Accentuate. We hope that this will be managed by Improbable - www.improbable.co.uk
Inspire Mark
Projects can carry the London 2012 Inspire mark from launch weekend onwards. See www.london2012.com/beinspired for more detail. Applications need to be received by June 13 to be considered for September 26 - 28.
Don’t forget
The event that you are organising might need a licence. We advise contacting your Local Authority Licensing Officer and Environmental Health Team as early as possible. Some authorities will require up to three months notice for a licence application.
Contacts
Caterina Loriggio, the Creative Programmer for London 2012 South East, should be your first port of call for getting involved in any of the above events. She can be contacted on c.loriggio@culturesoutheast.org.uk .
Further information on the Cultural Olympiad and the Inspire mark can be found on www.london2012.com/beinspired , please look on this website first before contacting Caterina with a general question. Through this web page you can also subscribe to Create newsletter which will keep you informed on London 2012 cultural activity.
Thank you for considering participation and we hope you will join us on the first steps of the road to 2012!
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