Since 2014 the NPO have been running a small arts festival and ongoing cultural events in the community of Claremorris and surrounding hinterland. Thus we have a proven track record and know what we are capable of doing depending on our budget, timescale and support.

·      We coincide with high quality national and International events such as culture night and heritage week as our values and objectives are the same. The evidence, which we’ve attached, demonstrates this and our engagement with the community.

·      We’ve put on high quality cultural events with artists and experts with support from public bodies, businesses and organisations in the community who bring their own expertise, advertising and audience to events such as:

·      Mayo Co Co, Foras na Gaeilge, Creative Ireland, Conradh na Gaeilge, The Historical Society, The Men’s Shed, The No Name Club, Primary Schools, Local Agenda 21, etc

·      Social enterprises such as Claremorris Community Radio, Clar IRD, The Town Hall Theatre

·      Privately owned venues and businesses such as Claremorris Gallery, Aperture Designs, Perspective

·      Many provide their services and expertise at a very reasonable price or for free, as they appreciate our work in community arts, culture and environment.

·      We will launching our cultural events for the summer with Cruinniu na n’Og 15^th June, The Little Prince. The event prototypes what’s on offer during Heritage Week. We’ll be able to gauge how much the participants enjoy and value being part of the creative process through level of active engagement, questionnaire feedback, etc. This event will provide more P.R. material with consent to advertise the summer school and photos, footage, etc.

·      The facilitators are well-experienced and have confirmed their interest in participating. We will have two facilitators for a total of ten days of events.

·      Mostly resources are sourced locally, recycled and upcycled. We have a lot of creative people in the community who have offered their support and will volunteer to help out at these events as their children will be attending.

·      We are well known as communitarians who work for social inclusion, co-creating events, like our film and  world cinema in languages other than English.

·       These cultural events are about active community engagement through collaboration and the creation of sustainable connections within ourselves and with others.

Ala 

Another alternative theatre group devising performances in a community context with whom I’ve worked in the past and soon to work with again, ALâ is a personal, social and community development organization founded in Galway, Ireland, in 2004. It is an inclusive, not for profit, membership run organisation, with charitable status. It uses theatre, arts and education as developmental tools.

{vimeo}73135192{/vimeo} ALâ have been running ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ Facilitation Skills Training courses over the past four years in conjunction with the Cty of Galway V.E.C, NUI Galway Societies and Clarecare. All of these courses have been facilitated by the best available facilitators/Jokers including Mary Duffin, Mags McMonagle, Janna Lindstrom, Annette Tierney, Andrew Jackson, Julian Boal, Gavin Crichton, Sarah O’Toole.

Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) facilitation skills training courses provide participants with a means of learning to use drama as an effective community engagement and social justice tool. To this end these courses offer both theoretical exploration and practical immersion in Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, with a particular focus on Image and Forum Theatre and in the context of community organizing.
It aims, in the work, to free up possibilities to move beyond the pathology of official narratives, and aspirations, freeing us to honour our unrecognized knowing, dreams, images and possibilities – as a movement towards a more just and humane world.

We are not interested in another event where we are talked at and spoon-fed the “right” answers. We are inviting people to interact, in real time in one place and face to face!

These courses bring facilitation to life. It is versatile and able to be applied to all facilitation areas; organisational, community engagement and therapeutic. We facilitate a very practical learning journey, which uses group work to introduce participants to the collaborative processes required for effective facilitation. It is a very practical learning journey, which builds on people’s experience and strengths as facilitators.

These courses offer a great opportunity for experienced and less experienced facilitators, consultants, trainers, activists and organizers wanting to use T.O. training tools more effectively. You will be offered lots of opportunities to practice and apply what you learn to your own work environment.

Kazu Suwa

Kazu Suwa is a Japanese classical guitarist based in London. 



Kazu begun his study of classical guitar under Mikio Hoshido in Tokyo, Japan. After graduating from the Nihon University College of Art, Kazu moved to Spain to continue his formal studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid. During this period he attended master classes and private lessons, among them by maestri: Manuel Babiloni, Gabriel Estarellas, Jorge Ariza, Ernesto Bitetti, Alicia de Larrocha, and Paul Badura-Skoda. Kazu performed solo recitals at various locations; music halls, churches, Universities, etc. in Japan, Spain and the UK.

Scarlattine Teatro

Scarlattine Teatro believes that theatre has to catch, to face, to appeal, to seduce, to dazzle, to amaze, to desolate, to cheer, to distress, to consume, to change life through a multiplicity of voices and ideas, promoting fusion of different languages to build bridges between the performing arts and communities. The spectator is a fellow traveller who we want to infect and involve. They believe that's the way...theatre lives only through the mutual [regard] of people who live life.

We’d like to bring Scarlattine Teatro promenade piece In-Boscati. Il Cammino dello Sguardo#4. Ikariotico about Theseus and the Minotaur to McMahon Park as a prelude to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be performed by our own “hempen homespuns” in conjunction with Scarlattine Teatro & Claremorris Men’s Group with mentoring from Belinda Wild of Green Room International.

Scarlattine Teatro – Campsirago Residency with its enchanted forest is an idyllic location for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we would like to bring to Italy afterwards.{vimeo}74276295{/vimeo}

Other Spaces (also known by the Finnish title Toisissa tiloissa)

Other Spaces is a Helsinki based performing arts collective. Founded in 2004, the group consists of around artists from several fields of arts.

The working principles of the collective are:

• I continuous training
• II exercise as a mode of performance
• III metamorphosis as the leitmotif of exercises.

Other Spaces invents and develops collective physical exercises through which people can enter in contact with modes of experience and being other than human. The aim of the group is to change together. The group performs its exercises regularly in public practical demonstrations and organizes workshops, Secret Retraining Camps.

Other Spaces' aim is to change together. It implements the dream of [an] equal, justified form of performance. By that it reduces the planetary fear and grants the hope to survive...Other Spaces' activities have become more political and ecological during their seven year existence. Being with the audience has developed and the performances are increasingly participatory. Members of the collective come from various fields of arts, including choreographers, theatre directors, documentary makers, actors, painters, writers, dreamers and many other everyday experts.

{vimeo}73625971{/vimeo}

Guth Gafa

The goal of the Guth Gafa International Documentary Festival is to bring documentary films made to the highest international standards, including Irish films to promote the documentary film industry in Ireland and to introduce them to a national and local audience. They also hope to contribute to the local economy by bringing in a significant number of international visitors and by attracting a large local and national audience to festival events, in the spectacular setting of Donegal. The Non Prophet Festival’s would hope be to keep some of the directors and their documentaries in the country a little longer to come to our festival afterwards.

On an educational and training level, they and we would hope to stimulate the development of best international practice in documentary film making by providing a forum for screening entertaining films, post-show discussions and master classes dealing with social issues relevant to all our communities.

Green Room

One has to create one’s own luck but I also believe in serendipity: working with David Rane, co-artistic director of Guth Gafa’s International Documentary Festival with his partner Neasa in Malin Village, Donegal, then with Michele and Anna of Scarlattine Teatro and last but not least with Belinda Wild at the DLI Summer School, Belinda and Ian Wild are co-artistic directors of Green Room International whose home base is a spacious and specially designed theatre studio in the centre of Bandon, West Cork, Ireland, practicing theatre professionals who have been training actors for over 20 years both in Ireland and the UK.

Green Room is also committed to bringing its workshops to international venues and to creating links with Theatre practitioners worldwide.

Brokentalkers

On a more concrete basis we’ll be working with the Mayo Parkinson’s Association and Brokentalkers under CREATE’S artist in the community scheme with mentoring.

Brokentalkers are a Dublin based theatre company formed in 2001. They tackle social problems such as homophobia and abuse in Irish church institutions. Dealing with community issues their ambitious work responds to the contemporary culture using elements such as original writing, dance, classic texts, film, interviews, found materials and music to represent that world in performance. This work has been presented in a variety of venues, ranging from theatres to public spaces, disused sites and the Internet.

How this came about:

My parents and I attend the monthly meetings of Parkinson's Mayo, where I informed the group I was going to make a documentary with my father about living with Parkinson's and asked the group if they'd be interested in participating. This sparked off an interesting discussion with more personal and intimate revelations than at previous meetings and some of the group were willing to personally participate in the documentary.Someone suggested forming a choir like in Galway and Brokentalkers’  ‘silver  stars’ sprung to mind. I told them that I’d be willing to create a choir and for us to consider making a documentary theatre piece and documentary around this if I could get funding for it.

The idea is that those who personally experience living with Parkinson's on a daily basis can talk about their lives to better inform society at large about this marginalised community and through the arts work on giving Parkinson's a "voice" by creating a devised performance piece using documentary and forum theatre practices and Greek chorus.

The objective of the R&D phase will be to introduce the members of Parkinson’s Mayo to the innovative theatre practices of groups like Brokentalkers and Rimini Protokoll, which are unknown to most of these people living in rural communities. With the aid of HSE Counsellor (Brendan Murphy) and a psychologist colleague of his (Martina Dilucia) who have offered their support to build a relationship of trust with the group and introduce these theatrical and documentary practices to help those who wish to participate overcome their initial fears of public exposure in a safe environment.

What we anticipate will be the outcome of this phase of the project:

The group will have an understanding of these alternative theatre practices and their effectiveness in tackling social issues through devised collaborations.

I would hope to develop a means for the group to be able to meet on a more regular basis in order to attend performances, play an active role in their community and give them something to aim for.

A lot of the older people and especially the men suffering from Parkinson’s have withdrawn from their involvement with the community because of this mentally and physically debilitating disease. My father used to sing in the church choir as did other members suffering from Parkinson’s but ceased due the difficulty of mobility caused by no longer being able to drive or to mount stairs thus not only losing their singing voice, a symptom of Parkinson’s but also the interaction with others in a social activity they enjoyed. So I want to address similar issues for other and seek possible solutions.

Through the practice of forum theatre and theatrical exercises associated with projection for performance as opposed to speech therapy I hope to convince the group that what I propose developing with them will give them an opportunity to physically voice their opinion and deal with their daily oppressions society isn’t necessarily aware of. The main objective at this stage is to open up dialogue to explore and discuss issues of ‘Parkinson’s dis-ease within the community’ and to facilitate giving voice and visibility to people’s concerns and experience.
So that’s where we stand today, waiting impatiently for more news to share with you.