by Author Becky Stickland

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Musical Mayhem: Time travelling with looked after children

Here at Bullfrog Arts we've been delighted to have received funding from Youth Music to deliver a singing project entitled Every Song Matters.

This is the third such project we've run in partnership with the Leicester-Shire Schools Music Service and Leicester City Council Looked After Children’s Service. The careful nurturing of this partnership has been the key to the projects success and with several years experience behind us we've come to the end of our Musical Mayhem: Time Travellers project confident that the agreed outcomes were brought about.

What is Musical Mayhem? This offers a series of ten after-school weekly creative workshops for looked after children between the ages of 7 - 11. The workshops are meticulously planned by trained artists to encourage and embed singing in the lives of this vulnerable group of young people and to support the development of self-confidence, self-efficacy through song and develop their creative, expressive and musical ability.

We work with a group of twelve foster children and meet over several months in the inspirational setting of our new theatre Curve in Leicester. The sessions always start with sharing afternoon tea as this provides an important opportunity to build relations with the carers and to learn from the children about any issues they may’ve experienced during the day that might impact on the session. It’s also very helpful in collecting anecdotal evidence of how the project is having a positive impact on the children not to that coming straight from school it's essential to reboost the energy levels. The young people, artists, social work team and supporting carers proceed to our Mayhem Office: a fantastically equipped theatre studio.

The sessions last for an hour and a half and it's pretty high energy! We've honed a format that works effectively for us which involves all starting in a circle together with a welcome, a physical warm-up, a vocal warm up and an introduction to that days task. Being singing based, we introduce songs usually based on a character that are eventually threaded together in a story. Through a combination of dramatisation, story-telling / creation, and singing we then take a short break to recuperate energies and spend time involved in a craft activity before coming together for a hearty sing at the end.

You travel through time? Yes and whilst we're happy to share our knowledge and experience of running these workshops; time travelling formulas remain top secret! Each series of Musical Mayhem is based upon a theme the last series focussed on carnival characters and this season we called it Time Travellers. The first gathering in the summer saw us create and build the Time Machine. Then each week, as a team of time travelling scientists we'd launch the Time Machine and a new character would emerge. We were enchanted by characters from ancient Greece, 1922 silent movie characters, the future, pre-historic cavemen. Each character revealed a new song. This culminated in bringing all of the characters together into a story, creating scenery and props and a final performance to family and friends at the end of the ten weeks.

And now the travellers rest... Well not quite! The title of Mayhem is not so far from how it feels to deliver on occasion. Whilst the sessions run only for two hours, the amount of work, preparation and planning that occur in the days between is immense. Working with these particularly vulnerable and sensitive young people the need for careful planning is even more essential than in mainstream settings in order that we create a safe environment and meet the individual needs of every child. So for the duration of Mayhem, as a team, the preceding days are spent designing, shopping, creating sets, costumes not to mention the administrative imbroglio in ensuring that all parties of the partnership, attendants, carers, social workers, premises staff and equipment all convene safely at the correct time without hitch and are well versed and rehearsed in all aspects of their role.

With our evaluation party and performance with the children now well and truly behind us it's time to pull together all of our evaluation, learning and draw a close to Musical Mayhem: Time Travellers Part 1. It's not over yet and can we urge everyone should time travel at least once in their lives.