September 7, 2017

By Boris Witzenfeld, Participation Manager

This summer at Hoxton Hall we have worked with over 200 young people aged 7-19 in our five week Youth Arts Summer School 2017. Each week in summer we used different art forms including dance, visual arts, tie dying, musical theatre, carnival and drama to give an exciting extravaganza of summer activity!

Week One kicked off with performing arts where both age groups created a piece of immersive drama around the theme of ‘creating their own town’. This helped them develop teamwork skills and learn the basic building blocks of group work to set them up for the future weeks. In Week Two, as part of their arts and crafts week they made pieces of art work including tie-dye t-shirts, slime and giant over-sized items, using recycled objects while exploring the theme of summer. In Week Three they explored different dance styles and created a piece of dance performance, dabbling in musical theatre, contemporary and hip hop.

Week Four was an exploration of musical theatre.  During this week our young people started to utilise the skills that they had been building up over the previous weeks to take on the challenge of putting on a piece of musical theatre. The 7-10 group made a piece of musical theatre called the ‘family holiday’  which explored what it’s like to go on a family holiday through drama and songs from musical’s such as ‘Summer Holiday’ and ‘Moana’. In Week Five the young people made their own carnival performance as part of multi arts week. They learned traditional carnival drumming from Burkina Faso and explored making carnival costumes from different carnival traditions such as West Africa and South America .

At the end of each week the young people performed their work in the our beautiful theatre at Hoxton Hall, bringing together friends and family to share in the work that they created, a wonderful experience for all parties.

This Autumn Term 2017 we are very excited to be working with our young people to develop new and exciting performances which will be performed here at Hoxton Hall. We will work across a broad spectrum of art forms exploring the theme of the ‘macabre’ inspired by a piece of immersive theatre, The Soulless Ones, by Hammer Horror as part of our Autumn Season.

Some of the classes are full already by there is still time to sign up and get involved in the projects we have on offer this term. For further details please click here

We can’t wait to get started!