Tangled Feet at Tallis

This film tells the story of a week long residency by Tangled Feet Theatre Company at Tallis. The work was commissioned by young people on the Creative Tallis Action Research Group following a long period of research and reflection about creative learning. The group felt that it would be interesting to begin to think about our move to a new school (scheduled for September 2011) and reflect on the emotional and psychological issues around moving home. Tangled Feet are co-directed by an ex Tallis student, Kat Joyce, and had created a play entitled "Home" which has been touring the country in a range of alternative venues. We wanted to see if a theatre company comprised of Tallis students and the Tangled Feet actors and technicians could work collaboratively for a week to create a series of interventions in the building designed to provoke thoughts and ideas about physical and emotional spaces.

"All in all, great congratulations should go to the ARG, for their courage in managing a very experimental piece, the school for allowing it to go ahead and have these seemingly random things going on, and the performers for incredible application and focus. I've worked with schools for over 20 years, and I can think of very few, if any, that have the staff, students and outlook to pull off something like this."
John Riches, Creative Agent

Here is what Kat had to say about the residency (the full conversation can be read on our Tallis Talk message board):

"We had a brilliant time working at Tallis, and I think the fact that we didn't stop talking about it over the weekend stands as testament to what an unusual, challenging, exciting and really rewarding experience it was for us as a company. It was great to shake up the concept of what a residency could be, and to be commissioned and to negotiate directly with the students about what we did and made. We were absolutely bowled over by the maturity, bravery, initiative and positive creative attitude of all the students, which made it possible for us to achieve a really really ambitious cycle of events and interventions. I felt like the normal line between 'visiting professionals' and students' was erased and everyone worked together as a company. The size of the group was just right to allow everyone to make a really significant creative contribution. Things just seemed to happen and order came out of a happy chaos! I think that the Tallis experienced definitely prompted us as a company to stretch our skill-set, and to set a new benchmark for what we might achieve with young people in the future. It's really made me start to think what we could achieve if we put our minds to a longer-term project; in a way I feel like we only just started to scrape the surface together of the incredible skills-set that this group had. We'd love to come back and develop the myriad of ideas even further. And we're also keeping in mind that it would be great to return the invitation and invite some of the Tallis students to work professionally with us in some capacity with us on future projects that Tangled Feet develop."
Kat Joyce, Co-Director of Tangled Feet

We decided to make a mini website about the residency using the excellent Wix.

We are very proud of the students from Years 7 to 13 who took part in the project and especially those members of the ARG who helped to commission and co-ordinate the entire process. They displayed a real maturity and sense of ownership of the learning journey that will hopefully have provided them with a memorable experience and range of transferable skills.

The Curious Minds School Council Conference

The Curious Minds Learning Network held their first school council conference on 3rd June at Columbia School.
The KS2 school council representatives from all schools came together to think about what things support their learning.
Guest speaker Ben Smith (AKA rapper and comedian Doc Brown) opened the conference and spoke passionately to the students about following their interests and talents.

The students then joined in with a series of different activities designed to get them thinking about how they learn best. Students learnt to juggle and build newspaper bridges!
Each student brought a piece of work to illustrate some work they had done at their own school that they particularly enjoyed and understood. These were made into a huge wall and students shared their work with each other.

At the end of the day, students thought about all the different ways they had been learning. They thought about how they like to learn best at school and with their school council colleagues they ordered their ideas.

The exciting and successful day was brought to a close by the Deputy Young Mayor for Tower Hamlets.

Creative Agents Conference

We are delighted that members of the Creative Tallis Action Research Group have been asked to make a presentation to the London Creative Agents about the role of young people in leading learning. The group has been very actively involved in advocating the importance of creative learning in school. They have written and published a Manifesto for a Creative Tallis, attended several staff and Leadership Team meetings and have commissioned a week long residency from Tangled Feet Theatre Company. They are looking forward to presenting their work, engaging the Agents in some creative learning activities and suggesting ways in which more young people can get involved in promoting creative learning in their schools.

Creative Tallis website

One of our challenges as a School of Creativity is to promote creative learning across the whole school. As a specialist arts college, we also have a commitment to sharing resources and ideas with our family of schools. Finally, we are keen to contribute to the national debate about the value of creative learning. Our Creative Tallis action research group has used a blog to keep communication going between meetings so the next logical step was to make a website that could gather together a whole range of evidence about creative learning all in one place. We chose Weebly, the free online web design application, to create the site and we have tried to use or highlight as many Web 2.0 tools as possible in order to demonstrate the ease and value of new tools for communication and presentation. The site has several pages, each with their own function and unique content. We will add to it and change the design on a regular basis to keep it fresh. We have a Creative Learning Forum so that visitors to the site can engage in a conversation with us. We would really like to know what you think about the site, especially if you have any constructive criticism to offer.

Year 7 Connections Day

We've just received the official documentary video of the Year 7 Cross-Curricular Connections Day that happened in April. Angus (Loaded Productions) has done a great job, in difficult circumstances, of capturing the rationale behind the day and the variety of activities that took place. I really like the student self-evaluations which demonstrate just how quickly they took to the idea of reflecting on the main themes, in relation to their learning, using new technologies. I'm looking forward to the Olympic Enterprise Day scheduled for Shine Week in July which has the even more ambitious brief of engaging the whole school!

Storytelling at Columbia 2

Our project kicked off with a grand storytelling day.

Didi Hopkins hosted 3 storytelling assemblies.

Storytelling at Columbia School

Since March, Didi Hopkins has been working alongside us to develop children and teacher's storytelling and storybuilding skills.

Didi is an experienced director and storyteller, more recently working with adults in the business sector. By the end of May, she will have met and worked with every child!

She has engaged the pupils at Columbia entirely and children are challenged to develop stories and dramas.

The workshops for each class, have been co-constructed by Didi, the children and the class teachers. The children have expressed to us a feeling of empowerment and teachers have shared that they are hoping to spread this way of working to other learning in their classes.

Living Cinema Evaluation

The Living Cinema event at Tallis on 17th March was an exciting evening of VJing, food, live music and discussion that aimed to explore new methods and business models for film based entertainment. The artists have just published their initial evaluation report of the project, based on research to date and the feedback from the Tallis event. It includes some fascinating observations which can be summarised as follows:

• The majority of the audience enjoyed the combination of film, food and music in a sociable atmosphere
• The audience were keen to see the work of the Vusicians and were interested in the technical aspects of the show
• The event proved to be an unusual and exciting way of engaging an audience of stakeholders in discussion about change and creativity
  
• The practitioner team experienced several technical challenges which require further investigation
• Young people collaborated very successfully with the practitioner team. One Year 11 student was drafted in at the last minute to perform vocals that generated live visuals and a team of staff and students belonging to the Creativity Action Research Group helped serve food, act as ushers and provide technical support.
  
• The teamwork generated on the night has helped to further bind this group of people together and provided them with the impetus to attempt a similarly ambitious project in the summer term
  
• There is huge potential to further develop work directly with young people in community settings based on this model

Here is some of the audience feedback:

"GREAT EVENING"
"Really enjoyable evening"
"really interesting event - want to know more about technical side of the live vj stuff -> would've been nice to be surrounded by the project[ions] horseshoe style ->would've liked to have been able to see what artist / technical creatives were doing whilst performance was happening - either movie screen showing them at work below main screen - or them orchestra
style in front of visuals"
"PUT THE ARTISTS UP FRONT, MAYBE BEHIND A GAUZE (TRANSLUCENT) SCREEN WITH PROJECTIONS"
"The music and videos were great! The band and food were amazing! Thanks for the wonderful event!"
"Really enjoyed tonight, thank you. Found the films inspiring, music uplifting & food very tasty indeed. Your waiting staff were lovely. Thank you for a great evening. Xx"
"WOULD BE NICE TO SEE THE MULTIMEDIA ORCHESTRA AT WORK"
"more guidance/explanation half-way through of how it was/is made/why?"
"On the whole, a great event"
"Very interesting - never been to anything like this before - it was good. Film at beginning was a bit 'self indulgent' definitely let audience participate in film a bit more, eg controlling birds etc - people like this kind of thing!"
"fascinating event combining visual and sounds with the human voice"
"Great event, very nice students, lovely food, wonderful entertainment"
"Thank you for having me, I had a great night, I've never been invited to a night like this before and it was a pleasant surprise."
"It was wonderful, I loved it!"
"more youth representation"

In research about cinema going habits prior to the event, the team discovered that, despite the majority of respondents almost never having seen or rented an independent film, people were excited by the notion of attending an independent cinema event if other entertainment elements were included such as food, music and dancing. Also, 90% of those asked claimed to download most of their film entertainment illegally from the world wide web. The majority of these people were students.

We are fascinated by the range of skills and aptitudes that students develop when they are engaged in the creation of media products. We are excited by the social benefits of such activities, not only in the sharing of final products, but in the team work and communication skills required throughout the process. We are actively exploring ways in which new technologies, especially tools associated with Web 2.0, can assist young people in collaborating more effectively and in finding an audience for their creative products.

The Living Cinema event has provided us with a new model for community consultation, a way of transforming learning spaces into media rich environments and inspiration for our own project in the summer.

The Creative Tallis Group visit Rivington Place

This short film documents a visit to the Liminal exhibition at Rivington Place by the Creative Tallis Action Research Group. The purpose of the visit was to:
1. learn about digital, interactive art
2. meet a curator and artist involved in the project
3. develop ideas for installations and events this summer as part of our School of Creativity project
We are very grateful to everyone at the gallery for allowing us to visit on a day when it is normally closed to the public. The show raised some very interesting curatorial questions and sparked an exciting brainstorming session for the group.

Year 7 Creative Science!

In the autumn term Year 7 undertook a scheme of work on Climate Change

The topic chosen to incorporate a creative element was:

Visualise the World in 30 years

The objectives of the project were to:

• Encourage pupils to think creatively in a science topic
• Engage them in the subject
• Increase their vocabulary on Climate Change
• Create a vision of the world through images

During the term, images were collected and a visual artist from Tate Modern was recruited for a 3 day residency in the lat week of term. The Artist’s brief was to devise a simple participatory event for the whole year group which added value to their image bank. The chosen artist: Viyki Turnbull proposed the attached workshop format

Day 1: Sorting & Sifting images into territories

Day 2: Building mini-theatres using the images, words and mini-recorders

Day 3: Viewing the boxes and reflection

Day One: Pupils were brought into the Cafeteria Area. The majority of pupils were involved in opening up an Image Bank and sorting the images into the 8 Areas. One group was in the White Space managing the images as they arrived and trying to see if a story or narrative emerged from the pictures and words for their particular topic.

Day Two: Pupils were in their Science Classroom and were given a Box and a selection of images and a topic. Their task was to create 3D images and place them in the box in an interesting way that gave the viewer a 20 second view of the future. They were given examples of how to make their images look interesting.

One group in each class was chosen to make the Soundtrack for the box. This was a 20 second mini disc that was placed on the box to add drama to the images.

It was interesting watching how the classes responded to the challenge. Generally they got the idea and worked well together to create a story inside the box. A few had to be finished by the Artist because of the time constraint. The highlight of the task seemed to be making the soundtrack. This generated interest and excitement.

Living Cinema

On Tuesday 17th March, Thomas Tallis School hosts a very special event entitled "Living Cinema" which has been created by a team of video artists, filmmakers and musicians and is a creative partnership between Eelyn Lee Productions, Thomas Tallis School and the Technology Strategy Board. Visitors can look forward to a "feast for the senses" whilst reflecting on our environment, the process of change and the notion of building a creative community. Live music will be provided by the Bollywood Brass Band. This event is a prelude to a further event (or series of events) in the summer, provisionally entitled "Food for Thought", which is designed to encourage parents to reflect on the value of creative learning.

On Monday 30th March, our Creative Tallis Action Research Group, comprising 8 students of varying ages and 5 staff members, are off to see the "Liminal" exhibition at Rivington Place, talk to the curator and one of the artists and spend the rest of the day planning our summer activities. We are keen to use the school building to house a series of disruptive installations in order to encourage everyone to think about the relationship between spaces and learning and what we expect such places to be like.

The Josh Beasley Award for Creativity