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Community Theatre Project at Ham House

Twenty four Drama students from St Mary's University College Twickenham are preparing for a large scale community theatre project for primary school students in the grounds of Ham House. The event will take place on May 22nd.

The St Mary's student group consists of writers, performers, administrators, technicians, directors and fundraisers and the groups were divided into four teams.

The schools liaison team talked to fifty two primary schools in the borough of Richmond upon Thames.  They spoke to over one thousand students and held individual workshops on literacy, creative writing, storytelling, arts and crafts and music making.

The fundraising team worked with Richmond Council and Dramatic Edge, the council's drama project initiative and liaised with the National Trust to gain access to Ham House.  The team raised £4,000 from fundraising events and corporate and individual sponsors

The design team are working on the transformation of the grounds of Ham House grounds into a magical kingdom, changing the children's ideas into a physical reality and the writing team devised and created story from the children's ideas.

The next stage of the project is a construction workshop in Ham on April 22nd . In the workshop, local children will help build structures and costumes for the play.

Mark Griffin, Senior Lecturer in Drama at St Mary's University College said, "The best thing about the project is its participatory nature.  It's fantastic for our students to be working with such a large number of primary school children to co-create an original adventure of which all of them feel a genuine ownership. It's a celebration of the epic power of imagination, something none of us involved will ever forget.

This project gives children a sense of involvement in a way that even reading great novels or watching brilliantly made fantasy films can't - they're right in the centre of adventure. It is creative, interactive and hugely good fun."

The project is linked to the 'cultural Olympiad' - five further projects are planned over the next 5 years, culminating with a community play in 2012 involving the Richmond community as a whole, both adults and children.

For more information about the project contact Mark Griffin's at griffinm@smuc.ac.uk or telephone 020 820 4063.