UPDATE: Burntwood Town Council Partnership

Earlier this year, we launched a three-year partnership with Burntwood Town Council, with a focus on creative development and a greater provision of opportunities in Burntwood. This has been an exciting venture, and we have thoroughly enjoyed working closely with the team at Burntwood Town Council to conduct cultural surveying of the community over the past months, as well as going out into the community and seeing what activities the people of Burntwood would like to see in their town. 

Our first endeavour under this partnership was Young Garrick Burntwood, launched in July 2024, which has successfully finished its first term, with three well-received debut performances at Burntwood Memorial Institute in October. We are thrilled to have welcomed and worked with such talented young people on the world premiere of Painting by Murders, written by our Head of Community Engagement Jonny McClean specially for the group and directed by our Community Engagement Officer, Sophie Allen. The youth theatre has been meeting every week and working on the play, under the expert guidance of our industry professionals. The rehearsals culminated in these performances for family and friends in a celebration of all the hard work of our incredible participants, with a positive response from everyone who attended. We are very proud of this brand-new group and what they have accomplished, and look forward to the next project with them!

As well as this, we toured our in-house production of Farm Boy locally including performances at Chase Terrace Academy and Burntwood Memorial Institute. Farm Boyis due to go on National Tour in 2025, so we are delighted we were able to bring this to Burntwood. 

We also partnered with Nurture Community CIC to create a performance called Memory Threads, based on a project focussed on shared experiences between all ages, and special memories. We then toured this small production to both the Burntwood Wakes and Play in the Parks.

Our community consultation in Burntwood allowed us to speak with over 350 people through questionnaires, interviews, meetings and more to understand creativity's place in the lives of Burntwood residents. We also met with a number of primary schools to see how we can better support them in the delivery of creative activities.

Outside of the partnership, we have also been working generally to provide additional creative activities in Burntwood. We worked with Chase Terrace Academy to deliver an academy trust-wide monologue competition. Additionally we have delivered several workshops to numerous year groups at Chase Terrace Academy.

We're excited to see what else our work in Burntwood brings and how we can provide more enrichment to the community in partnership with Burntwood Town Council and other community groups.