PAST PARTICIPATION
Songs from the Middle East and North Africa
Saturday 23 October 2021 | Royal Docks
Monday 25 October 2021 | Covered Market
Hear songs from the Middle East and North Africa performed by an ensemble of local Newham-based musicians, led by composer and musician Marouf Majidi. Part of Royal Docks Originals Festival.
World Music Workshop with Marouf Majidi
Saturday 23 October 2021 | Royal Docks
Monday 25 October 2021 | East Oxford Community Centre
Participants shared songs from the Middle East and North Africa with other local musicians in this fun and practical world music workshop led by composer and musician Marouf Majidi. Part of Royal Docks Originals Festival.
Creative Writing Workshop for Beginners with Hattie Naylor
Saturday 23 October 2021 | Royal Docks
Participants learned how to start writing and explore themes of travel and home alongside other local residents in this fun and practical community workshop, led by writer Hattie Naylor. Part of Royal Docks Originals Festival.
ACTOR-STEWARD PARTICIPATION PROGRAMME for THE GREAT MIDDLEMARCH MYSTERY
NOVEMBER 2021 - april 2022 | COVENTRY
Through workshops and rehearsals culminating in live performance, participants were invited to play a key role in shaping the story of The Great Middlemarch Mystery by being one of its cast of 'Middlepeople'. Part-actor and part-steward, the Middlepeople played characters alongside our professional cast to help create the world of Middlemarch and guide audience members through the experience.
Myths of Europe Workshops
23 - 24 September 2019 | Young Vic Theatre
In this two-day workshops, participants worked with director Tim Supple and dramaturg Katie Ebner-Landy to investigate material in search of the essence of a shared European identity. These sessions are part of our research and development for EUTOPIA and are followed by workshops in other UK and continental cities, as a first step to creating a trans-European, multi-lingual production that dramatises the story of European unification – its myths and realities.
The workshops culminated in a public sharing of excerpts generated by the workshop at Rich Mix on Wednesday 25th September.
International Performance Lab
20 November - 2 December 2017 | Rich Mix, London
In late November 2017, we offered an unmissable artistic and professional development opportunity exploring performance in the unique Dash Arts style - across art-forms, languages and cultural backgrounds. This International Performance Lab was targeted at UK-based performers (actors, musicians, actor-musicians) originally from another country.
Over two weeks (w/c 20 November and w/c 27 November), participants worked with the then Joint Dash Arts Artistic Directors, Tim Supple and Josephine Burton, exploring the novella Soul by the great Russian writer Andrei Platonov, an extraordinary tale of a nomadic community of different races and ethnicities in Central Asia in the 1930s.
The two weeks was a collective, physical, playful and instructive sharing of skills and experience. We finished the sessions with a public sharing work-in-progress.
Dash Blaze
In the summer of 2014 as part of Dash Blaze, we launched London-based workshops for musicians and theatre performers not born in the UK and for whom English is not their first language. Theatre workshops led by Tim Supple at Toynbee Studios and music workshops led by Josephine Burton at Rich Mix were both artistic and practical - exploring the rich legacies that performers bring to the UK, and offering what guidance we can through the labyrinth of the capital's arts world.
Lyrical Alliance
In 2009, Dash Arts ran a successful hip hop / spoken word pilot project which fed in to the development of Lyrical Alliance. As part of their GCSE work, we guided Year 9 English students at Westminster Academy through an exploration of the classical tradition of Arab poetry and encouraged them to create their own work in response.
The Mu'allaqat is a collection of pre-Islamic poetry, composed in and around the Arabian desert during 6 AD. Students considered what The Mu'allaqat reveals about the values, culture and heritage of the Arab identity and thought about modern-day parallels to The Mu'allaqat. The project challenged stereotypes and offered an opportunity for students to reflect on their own lives and create original work inspired by The Mu'allaqat and a professional hip hop artist.
Participants in this pilot worked with Mohammed Yahya.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In 2007, as an integral part of our hugely successful tour of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we ran two participation projects in London, Stratford and nine UK cities. Director Tim Supple ran workshops with students in schools, colleges and universities that shared the production’s approach to acting the text. At the same time members of the company ran workshops with young professional performers that shared some of the broad range of their physical skills such as stick fighting, martial arts from Kerala, Bharatanatyam classical dance and contemporary circus silk-climbing.
Faith to Faith
Run in 2007, Faith to Faith was a pioneering photography project involving Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh teenagers from five London faith schools. Funded by the British government, it aimed to create links between schools and communities by giving young people the opportunity to learn about different religions from each other, through the medium of photography and inter-faith teamwork.
More than 45 students, aged between 14 and 16, took part in weekly sessions with professional photographers and project organisers. They studied technical skills and different forms of photography with a view to exploring the links between image and identity.
Participating Schools: Guru Nanak Sikh School, Southall (Hillingdon), Islamia Girls’ School, Brondesbury (Camden), King Solomon High School, Ilford (Redbridge), Mount Carmel RC Technology College for Girls, Archway (Islington) and Swaminarayan School, Neasdon (Brent).
The Faith to Faith images were turned into a touring exhibition which travelled around the country. The exhibition is available to book again in future.