Monday 11th - Wednesday 13th July 2011

Monday 11th July

Today, as with all Monday’s was our office day and on today’s agenda was more marketing. During the morning we set about analysing The Firebird Trust’s promotion via the medium of flyers, the objective to identify what we liked about it and what we change about it, all from a personal view point. Content of the flyers was also scrutinised, ascertaining what information we felt as a group was relevant and how much content we felt was needed. The general consensus from this was that the content needed to be more concise and descriptive of the trust as a whole, rather than going to detail of every project and aspect. We also agreed that the colour scheme for the flyers could be a lot more vibrant…not in a garish way, but in a way that will catch the eye in a pleasant manner.

Later on during our session we took a look at web-site designs and how various companies/artists brand themselves. The main aspect of this was analysing how these companies and artists conveyed what they do to the public and how we could apply this to our branding overall, with five very different people the opinions varied wildly, but all in all it was still a very useful exercise.

Tuesday 12th July

For dancers it’s “five, six, seven, eight!” for musicians it’s “one, two, three, four!” either way there was a fair amount of counting in today as this was a final rehearsal with Fiona and Naledi for our final performance/music & dance taster workshop  at Dance Box next Monday.

As has been documented on this blog we have been exploring the world of creative collaboration between dancers and musicians and as part of this have been creating and refining a performance piece. With a solid structure and with an interesting piece at hand, today’s session involved repeating the piece over and over to make sure that the execution is as a tight as possible. The session went extremely well and has left us extremely confident that we can put on a good performance.

Wednesday 13th July

To start off today’s entry I’m going to take a quote from the very first FBT Diary post;

“Judgement day! Wednesday was in all honesty the day I was dreading/excited about the most, for this was the first time we were to unleash our workshop on real people!”

So! At the time, the prospect of testing out our workshop for the very first time was rather daunting, well; now that I look back I wonder what all the fuss was about as today was all in all far more terrifying, exciting and revealing. Today we embarked on our final trip to Tilbury Primary school in Hessle  and after observing Liam and Gary do their thing for the last two trips, it was now our turn to deliver workshops to the year one and year two classes.

With two very different plans in hand, mine based on body-percussion and Pete’s based on junk-percussion we set about making noise. The ease the kids into the afternoons activities we decided it best that I take the first twenty minute session and Pete to take the latter twenty minutes. For the whole day I had been extremely nervous about doing my first school workshop and indeed up until the last minute before I was “on” I was a bag of nerves, but with a sudden surge of confidence I took hold of the situation and had fun. Both classes were fantastic, being; attentive, polite, engaged and enthusiastic about the activities. At first I was worried that my workshop was going to be too basic and not hold their attention, heaven forbid! Even bore them! The opposite was quite true in the end; with a room full of smiling faces and the sound of joyous laughter I felt great and somewhat relieved. Pete’s junk-percussion workshop went down a treat too, a very noisy affair but all the same fun to watch and although the children didn’t hold many of the rhythms they were taught, they all had a lot of fun and that’s the most important thing.

The most interesting aspect for me during the day was working with children who are hard-of-hearing. After watching Gary successfully involve them in his workshop I was determined to get them involved. Interestingly enough they were able to hold a beat a much better than a lot of the other children, mirroring my counting movements almost to the millisecond.

Liam and Gary both observed us during our workshops and gave us a full evaluation of our work. This was a great eye opener, making us both aware of aspects of our delivery that were weren’t even aware of. Being able to have your work analysed by two experts is something you don’t often get the chance to do, and the pointers that were given were duly noted and will be implemented into our working practice.

A fantastic day all in all!

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!