UK Visit - Photographs

 Coffee with Her Grace The Duchess of Northumberland 

at The Alnwick Garden

Project group photo with The Duchess of Northumberland

and Alison Hamer of The Alnwick Garden

 The warm hut at the Poison Garden gates

Ulrika and Christer at the Poison Garden gates

 Drunken Scarecrow

Searching for workshop materialsin the vegetable gardens
on a windy, cloudy Tuesday

The Treehouse at The Alnwick Garden where we 

enjoyed a tasty lunch

Yauad on the rope bridge at

The Treehouse

Simeon at Bamburgh Castle

Enjoying English High Tea at the Copper Kettle, Bamburgh

Please add your own photos!
Headway Arts

A Welcome to Northumberland

Sad to see the Turkish, Spanish & Swedish CocreARTISTS leave.  You have become valued members of the Headway Arts family! It's been a fantastic week hosting our CocreART mobility. Fran & I hope we have offered the best of Northumbrian hospitality alongside a varied programme which showed examples of education & learning both in and out of formal settings, as well as our creative programme here at Headway Arts. The delegates were made exceptionally welcome at Cleasewell Hill School (many thanks to John Parker & U4 pupils) where we spent time in the classrooms with the children.  A bonus was visit from a live reindeer 'Rudolf' which enabled the Swedes to talk to the children how they live in the wild in Sweden and give an impromptu Swedish lesson in the playground. Headmaster Kevin described the progressive thinking applied to ways of learning in school. Our visitors commented on how relaxed and friendly the atomosphere was with both staff & students seeming very happy there.

Tuesday was our 'Day of Castles' where we took in 4 of our coastal Castles (5 if you count Fran who is also a Castle :-)).  Thanks to my hubbie Andrew who provided me with the historical facts I was able to pass on. We were welcomed beautifully by Her Grace The Duchess Jane Percy at The Alnwick Garden, where we heard from Alison Hamer about the excellent Education Programme which featured drug awareness work relating to the poison garden and the roots & shoots garden promoting an understanding of the outdoors and horticultural experiences for children in Northumberland.  We had hearty soup in The Treehouse which looked like fairyland - covered with tiny lights - preparing us for the sea air at historic Banburgh Castle the ancient seat of the Kings of Northumbria. A wild windblown walk on the beach was followed by English High Tea at the Copper Kettle Tearooms.

Thats all for now folks, next week I'll write up methodology & my thinking behind the workshops and also commentry on the rest of the programme. So if there any questions now you have had a little time for reflection please ask. Also do make posts yourselves. Kerri will post her photos. Bye for now dear partners..missing you already!

Allie

Alison Walton-Robson, Creative Director, Headway Arts 

To be continued....

Sweden 2011 - A Headway Journey.

Greetings to you all. Please enjoy the story of our brilliant journey to Sweden in February 2011. Thank you to our hosts for a wonderful experience and best wishes to all our European partners.

An incredible journey

Many thanks to our wonderful Turkish partners who showed us the very best of Turkey: The important work being done by the voluteers at Begder. The natural home-cooked food (lovingly hand-made breads at the home of Omer). The beautiful historical landscapes at Sagalossos & Burdur.  The hard working, generous and warm hearted Turkish people. 

Turkish hospitality is long the stuff of legend - and it's all true!!

With the excellent company of our Swedish friends, we had a wonderful memorable experience.  In the words of Kris Brown (project learner UK): 'I wish I could feel like this every day' He said he felt his disabilty was not an issue in this suportive and enabling environment. We learned the beautiful art of EBRU and personally I could have meditated amongst it's flowing forms long into the night and plan to run a workshop with our groups here at the earliest possible opportunity.  Other great experiences involved meeting family & picking the most gorgeous cherries Ive ever seen, watching the swallows & the trout, meeting the well mannered but eager & excited children of Begder, sharing in the spirituality of the mosque at Burdur and learning more about each others ways over sun dabbled lunches underneath tall pine trees. The soundtrack to this was lots of laughter both nervous and comfortable, the tinkling of spoons in the chai glasses & the spine tingling call to prayer.

I saw the growing confidence and comfort of all our companions and pleasured in sharing in their new experiences (especially those of our learning disabled learners). Having the chance to conceptualise, devise & run a workshop was very special, including exercises led by our learning disabled learners, working with everyone and the co-creation of our artwork on the final morning - all these images that will long stay with me. It was wonderful to feel all of our relationships deepening, language not an issue, finding our feet and our voices; speaking to each other in different languages, somehow understanding! We were of course helped in this by the excellent English of Ahmet and Monica.

So having practically explored our aim of 'co-creation' we began to consider the wider learning outcomes, such as group concentration, cooperation, confidence building and skill sharing and how we might apply what we have learned from each other in different contexts. Fran and I have been working hard to define the Headway working methodology which we have developed over a number of years and of which this workshop was an example.  

We also will be lookingat how we can pass on the partnerships learning & collective  knowledge to others as European added value. I look forward to deepening our study at the next mobility in the U.K by further identiying our learning outcomes and how we can transfer these to other situations.


England eagerly awaits to welcome you all!!! Until then dear colleagues...

güle güle, 

hejdå vi ses snart

Allie

Alison Walton-Robson
Creative Director
Headway Arts

Updates

Hello partners.


Please do add responses to the findings of each mobility - this can be in the form of photos, quotes, comments and anything you found you learnt or that was useful to consider.

Coming soon is a slideshow of our excellent Swedish mobility. I hope it will illustrate the co-creative workshop learning and experiences of Swedish culture we all had. I was particularly struck by the flexibility of learning in Sweden, the way the programming at Medlefors acknowledged & closley reflected the needs of the learners, enabling them to learn activley at their own pace. This kind of supportive environment nutures confidence and empowers people, giving them control to direct their own progress, when they feel they are ready to take on more - they can.

Soon we have another mobility in mid July to Burdur in lovley Turkey.  Members of The Seven Stars Learning Disabled Theatre Co will be part of the Headway Arts team.  All are excited about the next mobility where we will be trying out our co-creative ideas as an international group. Ahmet is arranging a programme of cultural visits in Turkey - Fran & I are looking forward to immersing our selves in the Turkish way of life.  I am planning a co-creative workshop for everyone to participate in, which will draw on the tradition of Turkish shadow puppetry, be informed by the sights, sounds and contributions from our international colleagues. Our disabled actors from Seven Stars are looking forward to a chance to share their talents with everyone.

elveda biz türkiye buluşmamıza kadar
 
best of wishes to you all
Alison Walton-Robson 

Bolognal Conference

We have a great opportunity for disseminating our CoCreART project next month when Alison Walton-Robson will be speaking at a conference in Bologna on April 2nd 2011.

The conference has developed from the idea put forward in our original proposal and will explore the idea of CoCreation and the process of working together towards a common goal, looking more specifically at how this relates to the psyche and how it is used in a therapeutic setting.

The conference has been organised by Guilio Casini who applied to be a partner in the CoCreART project but unfortuantely did not receive the funding to join us. As his organisation specialises in the psychology of dance this will obviously be a focus of the conference but it will be a good opportunity for Allie to disseminate our work and hear about other work that is happening in this field.

Fran

OH, Ceuta

How wonderful to remember Ceuta;-)) especially this week, since we have had minus 31 C

You were lucky not to be here this week. The weather was at it´s best when you visited Skelleftea. Most cars "died" on Monday morning because of the cold and so did my husbands car, but not mine :-))

I will try to put some photos here too. Maybe on Sunday because I am very busy until then.

Lots of love to you all from Maggie

Greetings from Headway Arts (UK)

We have finally put our photos together to tell our story of Headway's excellent trip to Ceuta in October 2010. We wish a Happy New Year to our European partners and we look forward to seeing you all in 2011.

best wishes from us all.