Mythbusters

How can we understand others unless we know ourselves?

Mythbusters is a residential programme at Scargill House in the Yorkshire Dales. Urban Circus have helped to devise and develop this course over the past two years.

Our role is to facilitate the programme for primary and secondary schools. We deliver circus workshops and group work sessions focusing on identity.

This programme consists of team challenges, learning new skills & working towards a performance. Underpinning this is a fun and relaxed atmosphere where the young people are encouraged to learn more about themselves and their peers.

S.C.I.P.

This has now been running for three years, we work with a group of schools using circus and creative arts to look at issues around culture and identity.

As well as learning skills in circus and performing arts they are given the opportunity to speak openly about their thoughts on their own and others culture.

We discuss issues around identity in fun and accessible ways using games, challenges and team work.

Each school has one session per week for 25 weeks

The schools link together to discuss what they have been doing over the year and perform their shows to each other.

Expression

This course is based around the benefits that play can have the emotional, academic and creative development of young people.

We allow the participants to help us develop the programme as we progress.

Unfortunately we continually find ourselves working with children who are either not encouraged to play or don’t know how to play as part of a team. Expression uses games, challenges, performance and drama as tools to demonstrate the positive attributes that play can have on our lives.

Neighbourhood Forums

We are currently working with Bradford Area West on a series of Neighbourhood forums.

We work with 20 young people from a school that is hosting the forum, during the day they learn a variety of circus skills and in small groups discus issues that concern them about their local area.

At the end of the school day the children perform to the rest of their school and in the evening they perform to local people at the forum.

All the work they do during the day is collated by ourselves and later presented to the school in the form of a creative display.

Holy Kapow!

Following on from the success of Daryll’s circus nativity and Easter story UCA and Harrogate and district YFC are teaming up to kick start “holy Kapow!” Daryll will be heading up this project that will entail writing and performing new shows, training young people and developing creative Christian ministries. There will be lots of exciting developments over the next few months so keep on checking in to see what’s been happening.

Why do boys Underachieve?

This course will look at the role models that boys have, public and private perceptions of masculinity, how we can nurture gifts in seemingly “difficult” boys and how to turn underachievers into successes.

We have now ran two successful courses in Bradford schools – in both cases the improvement in both behaviour and educational attainment has been clear to see.

Through a mixture of structured and unstructured play, performance development, small group work and a sense of fun these sessions have been a delight to be involved in.

It is wonderful to see how people can develop given the right input, structure and support. We are now offering this course to schools nationally; please contact us if you are interested.

Schools work in Romania

The Secret Circus Project

Over the past few years we have been developing our work with schools in Romania and have now taken the step of purchasing a property and land that we are going to convert into a training centre for Circus, Physical Theatre and Creative Arts.

The property is in the Transylvanian countryside about 20 miles from the city of Cluj, alongside our work in the village schools we will also be developing links in the city.

Our aim is to have a performance and practice space in the old barn and use the house for staff and visitors. We will run regular sessions for the local villages and also run weekend and weeklong courses for other Romanians and international visitors.