TRANSFORMING A SPACE FOR CREATIVE PLAY

LITTLE FEET FESTIVAL AT YORK THEATRE ROYAL

As told by Catherine Chapman, Artist and Designer

Who am I?

I am York Theatre Royal, a 260 year old listed building, constructed from the ruins of a medieval hospital.

What did I want to achieve?

I wanted to open my doors to huge numbers of very young beings and their families for a one week festival. To use all of me – not just the theatre spaces - as an interactive and creative space. To attract newcomers and build an engagement with them that has a life beyond the end of the Little Feet Festival.

What was getting in the way?

Me! I had all the limitations of an old space, even my concrete foyer is listed, and I am a grey and formal, severe looking place. I don’t appear to be child-friendly at all – everything is set at an adult height and for the convenience of adults, and the staff are all geared up to run things according to their regular patterns and routines, which is not targeted at 0 – 5 yr olds. There is nowhere safe and obvious for children to play.

Who and what helped?

The whole of the theatre staff came on board for the project. We were all agreed that we would turn the whole building over to children and their families for a whole week. This meant that things would have to be done differently.

The café bar changed its layout inside and out to create a safe and stimulating environment and gave more prominence to a play area for children. A new menu of children-friendly meals and drinks was produced.

Education staff set up and ran a range of interactive activities, so there was always something on offer to do – whether it was making a monster out of junk, creating rainbows, dressing up, decorating gingerbread men or going on a treasure hunt through the building to find a missing story.

Front of house staff adapted their working practices to allow for activities happening all over the building. People who dropped into the building with their children were steered towards the range of activities and events on offer.

We also set up Storymakers, a pre-school craft and storytelling session to run in the lead-up to the Festival to begin to create a pathway through my doors and through my interior, to start to use my spaces differently, and to help raise awareness amongst parents that this ancient old building is somewhere they can bring their children.

How did we go about overcoming obstacles?

The biggest obstacle was the cold, grey corporate appearance of me, myself. So to overcome this, we asked one of our theatre designers – who would normally design theatre sets - to re-design my foyer instead. We asked her to transform it into a magical, colourful space, where people would want to come and play and stay (have a look at the film at the top of this page to see how we did this). She worked with school groups to create some artwork in advance, then literally covered every inch of grey wall space with ribbons and bunting, paintings, and handmade decorations. She lay bright green turf on the old grey patio outside, and put up a playhouse with games and a sandpit outside to provide a sunny day play area. My whole interior was transformed with colour – have a look at the photographs we took!

This helped overcome our other main obstacle – attracting parents’ attention – the decorations and play areas were clearly visible as people walked past my doors, and this drew many people off the street out of curiosity. The immediate, visible presence then of a craft table with things to make and do for free, and friendly staff around to help, made the welcoming message loud and clear, and encouraged people to stay and see what else was on offer.

What was the outcome?

We created a sense of excitement and engagement in the building with all age groups, and many people came through our doors for the first time, and came back again and again throughout the week, and many more are urging us to run this kind of work on a regular basis. We created a sense of adventure, with all the staff trying out different ways of approaching their jobs and my spaces.

We have broken down some of the barriers that people perceive in the theatre space, and have allowed a sense of ownership of the building and familiarity with it for many of those who came and played, relaxed, took their shoes and socks off in the sandpit, and roamed around the stairways, back passages, secret doors and spaces in the building in pursuit of a good story.

We have inspired ourselves and surprised ourselves at what we were able to achieve. This is encouraging us to continue to explore the possibilities of opening our spaces both inside and outside the building for future events.

We are planning to make the Festival an annual event – even if we don’t have additional funding, as the biggest impact was the opening up and transformation of the building itself, and the simple activities that were on offer.

Storymakers is still running, and we are looking at this becoming a more permanent event. We are keeping the play areas inside and out, certainly through the summer, in response to the amount of parents who told us that “there was nowhere else like this” in the city centre.

Story told by Catherine Chapman, Artist and Designer
Storycatch supported by City of York Council (Inclusive Arts, Arts & Culture) - July 2010