Bazooka Arts - Creating Connections
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Bazooka Arts is a Glasgow based arts organisation, comprising drama and visual arts practice. Its working methods are facilitative rather than directive and it aims to help people engage in the creative process in a way that helps them use their imagination, creativity and co-operation in a group. Bazooka Arts’ delivery methods are consciously designed to use arts intervention to effect personal and social development leading to empowerment, greater integration, and education, or to aid regeneration and development.
Creating Connections Arts Network
In addition to delivering practical arts projects Bazooka Arts artists deliver training and advice to groups to help build and sustain existing arts provision. The organisation is working strategically with other arts agencies and service providers to create a formal arts forum to help connect marginalised groups to local and national arts activity and organisations, and to provide a stepping stone for those who need a ‘lead in’ to engage with or participate in the arts.
Future Projects
- Living Landscapes, Living Legends: This project will be delivered by the Creating Connections team in partnership with Museum Services, Lanarkshire. It will run from November 2007 to March 2008 and will culminate in a performance and exhibition of work.
- Arts and Mental Health Festival October 2007, Glasgow/Motherwell
- A Stage Further Theatre Company has been invited to perform at two events as part of this festival and art groups have been invited to exhibit work.
- Creating Connections: Mind, Body and Soul. Two six-week creative courses will run in Wishaw and Cumbernauld from September – December 2007.
A five-year strategy has been created with partners from North Lanarkshire Council, North Lanarkshire Volunteer Service and LEAF. As a result, a bid has been submitted to the Big Lottery Investing in Communities Fund for a multi agency project, The North Lanarkshire Connection. It is hoped that, should this project be funded, it will build on the work undertaken to date by Creating Connections.
Creating Connections is an arts and health project that is currently being delivered throughout North Lanarkshire by Visual Artist and Designer, Bryony Murray, and Theatre Artist and Dramatherapist, Zoe Brook. The project provides opportunities for marginalised people to become connected to their community through participation in creative projects. It also aims to promote positive mental health and wellbeing through creative participation and to make public, positive images of disability through a series of performances and exhibitions in the wider community.
The project was developed by North Lanarkshire Council, artfull and Bazooka Arts, and has been commissioned by the Adult and Development Section within Housing and Social Services at North Lanarkshire Council. It has been running since February 2006 and will continue until March 2008. Artists spent time developing the project through a series of consultations or ‘connections’ in the community, enabling them to form working partnerships with participants, service providers and other local agencies before embarking on Phase 2 of the project. The idea of ‘Creating Connections’ informs all aspects of the project - from the artists’ approach to partnership working, consultation and research, to inspiration for creative work.
Central to the aims of this way of working is that the project evolves and is shaped in response to the needs, ideas and networks generated through consultation and partnership work. Some projects take the form of short-term taster blocks that act as a stepping stone to mainstream arts provision, while others are longer-term programmes which have resulted in groups initiating activity in their own right. Recent examples of Creating Connections projects include:
- A Stage Further Theatre Company: a theatre company that promotes positive mental health and recovery from mental health problems through drama participation and performance. The members devise and write their own shows and have performed at many mental health related conferences.
- The Material Girls: St James Court Sheltered Housing Complex. Bazooka Arts invited residents to participate in a six-week taster block in a range of visual art techniques. The members of the group varied in age and ability and, for the majority of them, this project was their first encounter with art since their school days. The artists arranged for the group to visit the Doves and Dreams exhibition at the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow, which proved to be a turning point for the group. It fuelled them with inspiration and enthusiasm to create more work and they began to regard themselves as artists. The group held an exhibition in March 2007, which attracted new members.