Celebrating 40 years and creating Winter Lights

Published on 1 May 2024.

This year we are celebrating four decades of inspiring imaginations and sparking creativity through theatre!

Throughout the year, we are celebrating children’s voices and moments of joy - sharing highlights from the last 40 years and looking to the future!

Winter Lights

As part of our 40th celebrations, we are collaborating with children, young people and our community to create Winter Lights - a project that will culminate in a special community event in January 2025.

The theme of this project is 'moments of joy and light' – where we find these in our lives, in our communities and environment.

Stories will be central to the project – what stories we tell, who tells them, how we tell them and where we tell them.

We are working with artists, children and young people and families to explore stories in a variety of ways – creating and shaping the work with children’s voices at its heart. These may be about life in Barton Hill and Bristol – real or imagined, set in the future, now or the past!

See the event page here.

All our youth theatre groups and other creative projects are exploring the same theme over the spring and summer terms.

Working alongside an experienced and inspiring team of artists the groups will research, develop, devise and rehearse an exciting performance, which will form part of the programme for our ‘Winter Lights’ community event.

The initial phase of the project will run from April – June in weekly sessions.

The project will then continue in September when the piece will be refined and rehearsed, ready for a performance in January 2025.

All the youth theatre groups will work together on this project and there will be a chance to find out more about different elements of making theatre – directing, designing, sound/music and movement.

Want to get involved?

There are a number of opportunities to get involved in Winter Lights – if you are a young person, you could join our youth theatre. If you are an artist/faciliatator/ex-staff/trustee/audience member, you could share your 'Travelling Light moment of joy' to add to our installation of joy that we are creating for Winter Lights.

Join our Youth Theatre

Our groups have started to explore ideas for stories which will be developed into a performance for Winter Lights and there is still time to join one of these groups and be involved in the project.

We currently have spaces available in 6-9's, 10-12's and 13-16's.

If you have a young person that might be interested in taking part, please get in touch with Ellie via text/WhatsApp or email with the age of your young person & full postcode, on 07305 102 843 / youththeatre@travellinglighttheatre.org.uk.

Share your 'Travelling Light moment of joy' 

Do you have a story, picture, song or message you would like to share? If so, we would love to hear from you and add it to our installation of joy.

This could be something you send to us in advance that we can collate or, perhaps you want to share it live?

We also have some space in our programme for creative offers for our community – so if you have any joyful ideas of things we could share with others, we would love to put these ideas to our young producers who are helping curate the event.

Please send all messages/photos/videos etc to Lizzy Stephens by Friday 10 January 2025 at lizzy@travellinglighttheatre.org.uk

If you would like to be involved, help out, or have any ideas to share, please contact Lizzy by Wednesday 20 November 2024.