Arts Award

Arts Award

NeST art gallery and Turrets Youth Theatre Group have teamed up to deliver Special Edition Bronze Arts Awards to young people drawn from across the area. The awards are being delivered by arts award advisers Judith Lesley Marshall and Jill Cole as part of the Winning Words project.

When Barnard Castle was chosen to be one of the seven beacon towns for the cultural olympics in 2012, we proposed to work with schools, youth groups and the local community to produce poetry for interpretation into an art installation.

Now that the local competition is underway we have turned our attention to workshops for the young people.  (For details of the competition see previous post)

Winning Words have designed an online interactive computer game called ‘Generator’ which is a bank of words on olympic themes and values.  Words are generated as a stimulus to producing raps, sonnets or performance poetry.

Thinking along similar lines the young people from Turrets are working with words found in Charles Dickens’ eight poems as a starting point for creating new poems.  These will be performed to an invited audience on the 20th June – the day the Olympic flame is due to pass through the town.

The performance will complement the much acclaimed Nicholas Nickleby play developed by a different Turrets theatre group.  The two groups will come together to provide an evening of entertainment at NeST gallery in Newgate, Barnard Castle.

Young people working towards their Bronze Arts Award will also attend and review other arts events, study an arts hero/heroine of their choice and share their skills with others in a form of apprenticeship.  Young people document their journey in portfolios which can include audiovisual, digital and written information as well as photographs and illustrations.

We are delighted to be able to offer this opportunity to young people from three secondary schools in the area and hope that we will be able to secure funding to enable them to progress to silver and gold awards.