31 Days of January: Emerge Walsall~
With the New Year brings a new sense of fresh air to the Walsall Emerge Project. January has seen the Emerge lab 1 back after the Christmas holidays full of energy and starting to work on their 2nd and in some cases 3rd group or solos performance ideas. As well as working with lab 1, the second lab with the young people from Aspire associated with Shelfield Ormiston Academy has started on Wednesday mornings. This group is slightly smaller than lab 1 but has a direct match in the enthusiasm for this project.
In the initial sessions with lab 2 I was able to bring them up to speed on where we are at with the project currently by showing them videos and pictures of some of the performances the group had already created. Additionally I showed the logo and festival flyer mock designs and spoke about the current budget plan. Inspired by lab 1 the group began to put forward ideas on things they wanted to have at the festival. Some of the ideas the group had down already and others were new and unique to this group.
One of the workshops with The Aspire group was looking into what they new about Shakespeare’s and seeing how much they could relate Shakespeare’s themes of love to there life now. As a whole group we discussed the festival theme ‘ Love is not a straight line’ and came up with a few ideas and connects about what it means to them.
Walsall Emerge has now been awarded the funding by the image Ambassadors we are now in a position to start spending some of this money on items on the festival list. Its safe to say that there will be a inflatable disco dome at there festival for the last hour of the event after the performances and workshops have been completed.
From Friday the 1st of February there will be an online marketing campaign running until the 31st of March. The festival marketing campaign will be online on social media email and there will be some flyer print distribution around the Walsall area and Birmingham area.
The month of February into March will see the development of the active marketing campaign online being added to by the young people themselves, local organisations and key partners in the project including the festival venue The Walsall Arboretum Park. I am most excited about this next phase of the project seeing they young peoples ideas and the festival plans come to life.
Kindest Regards
Namiwa Jazz
