Tag Archives: outreach

Winter dance faktry festival 2016

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winter dance faktry festival 2016

winter dance faktry festival 2016

Our twice yearly festival for dance will be held at The Met in Abertillery on November 12th 2016 at 7.30pm.  It’s an opportunity for children, young people and emerging professional dancers to perform and share their work to a packed audience which is supportive and full of enthusiastic friends and parents.

It’s a most special event which aims to promote dance in the community and provide dancers with a professionally produced showcase, giving the festival participants a taste for performance and choreography

 

Outreach at its most rewarding

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2 of our youngest dancers at Desire To Dance Brynmawr

2 of our youngest dancers at Desire To Dance Brynmawr

The past month has been truly rewarding with our dance faktry projects running concurrently at Brynmawr and Tredegar. Our Desire To Dance Project successfully ran at Tredegar and London last season; together with generous funding from Tai Calon Community Housing, we ran a similar project in Brynmawr for the children of the community in that area. They worked for 4 intensive full days over 2 weekends with Effie, Catrin, Louis and Cariad and produced a lovely piece of work focussing on touch and skin.

At Tredegar Comprehensive School Catrin, Julian and Louis worked with a group of young Performing Arts students to create a piece of work that was choreographed to music written by GCSE Music students from the school. 2 intense evenings from 3.30pm – 8pm were spent making the work.  We facilitated this project with funding from a legacy given to Arts Development at Aneurin Leisure, kindly donated to give young people experience with music and theatre.

The 2 pieces were shown to friends and family at the Annual Dance Showcase organised by Aneurin Leisure Arts Development at The Met Theatre in Abertillery, our home theatre.

Desire To Dance Brynmawr

Desire To Dance Brynmawr

The experiences gained by the children and young people were many, but I think the most valuable things learnt were working together to produce a high quality product and digging dip and finding inner strength especially when exhausted!  Of many evaluations from the project participants who were all wowed by their achievements was a comment to Catrin – “you’ve changed my life” – a lump comes into my throat as I write.

Moving on then, we turn our thoughts to our next outreach project, the Summer Dance School. More about that very soon, please feel free to pass on this flyer to all young people who you think may benefit ..

summer school 16

 

 

 

 

 

 

sue lewis

All go

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FFIN DANCE Image Paul Trask

FFIN DANCE
Image Paul Trask

So it’s all GO this week in the South Wales valleys. Fellow company dancer, Catrin and I arrived Monday afternoon ready to lead our first workshops passing on the movement material and ideas behind the t e n Tour 2016 to the local community. We had 4 workshops happening across the evening for a variety of ages from infants to seniors from groups including Ffin Infants & Juniors, Ffin Youth Dance Company and Toppers School of Dance & Drama.

The young dancers had an amazing time, showing great energy, enthusiasm and interest in the workshop content. We were also delighted to be joined by Sarah Lee Pryke who will be joining FFIN DANCE later in the summer. Sarah has already begun learning and researching our new repertoire and assisted Catrin and Julian to deliver yesterday’s workshops.
With the première of our new dance works fast approaching, the real work is yet to begin. Tuesday has been a day of admin, planning, costume fitting and photoshopping – not to mention a slice of Grandma’s fruit cake and a cheeky glass of wine!
We’re back in the studio today for some last minute rehearsals and fine tuning. We also have more community workshops and are leading professional company class on Thursday and Friday. This Friday night will be my first full-length performance with FFIN DANCE and I’m especially excited as it marks the beginning of the 10th anniversary celebrations for the company. It’s been such a pleasure to work with Sue and my fellow performers Catrin, Effie and Natasha so far and I can’t wait to share the stage with them.

If you haven’t yet booked your tickets for the show, we’d love to see you there!

t e n poster FinalFriday 20th May, 7:30pm – The Met, Abertillery – tickets are £8/£6, call the box office on 01495 355800 to book

Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and our website for updates on our future performances and projects.

Thanks, Julian

New adventures

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Desire To Dance ticketsOur new project Desire To Dance has kicked off with 2 marvellous performances at Bedwellty House, Tredegar in South Wales and St Paul’s Church, London.  The aim of this project is to work in partnership with a community dance group who is situated near a chosen venue: the venues all being in the heart of the community and offering cultural interest to the people of that community.  We are specifically interested in performing this work outside of traditional theatre venues to demonstrate that any space can be a space to perform, and to develop new audiences for dance in terms of both participating and watching.  In addition, the venue gets an intimate and up-close performance of our current triple bill – Power Of 3

I was delighted with new friendships made at both of the venues, the extent of which can’t be documented really.
The staff at Bedwellty House had never hosted a dance performance in their beautiful Grade 2 listed Regency Villa, but really went the extra mile (and more) to help us achieve success.  Similarly, at St Paul’s Church in Marylebone, the priest and her staff were outstanding in their hospitality and kindness (even offering me a parking space for the day as someone had already parked in my JustParking pre-paid space grr…)
The children and young people of Tredegar Comprehensive School, Wales and Highgate School, London were wonderful in their energy and commitment, again going well past what we had expected.

My thanks to the staff of the groups again for supporting our projects and to our company dancers who worked ridiculously long days to achieve perfection.

If you have any ideas for future partnerships in 2016 with youth groups/schools, please don’t hesitate to contact me info@ffindance.co.uk or text 07854 910926

sue lewis

 

 

Dance provision

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SCARF Infants Class Image Paul Trask


Image Paul Trask

We are most happy to announce that FFIN DANCE will be working in partnership with the Arts Development team of Aneurin Leisure Trust to deliver high quality dance classes for children and young people in Blaenau Gwent, South Wales UK.

The ffin dance faktry will be expanding upon its already successful outreach folio to include the following dance classes:

Leapers Dance for under 11 years
Junior Move Dance for ages 7-13
Combination Dance age 13+
The Move Youth Dance Company age 13+

All of the above classes will be held at The Beaufort Theatre, Ebbw Vale, Gwent UK

Suzanne Allen the Business Development Manager for Aneurin Leisure Trust says “I’m delighted to be working in partnership with FFIN DANCE to provide classes for our children and young people.  I’m looking forward to some new and exciting projects and supporting this really vital work in our community”

For further information on classes and the work of the ffin dance faktry, please e mail info@ffindance.co.uk or call/text 07854 910926

Packed lunches and applause

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_PRT7504Well, the last week of the New Ground summer holiday dance clubs is about to commence – probably to be the most challenging week for all involved, as the duration of the workshops will be at least doubled. With this increase in time we are looking to combine all of the skills and techniques learned and practised over the past few weeks with the children’s creativity, and arrange this so that it can be presented and shared with the onlooking proud parents/carers/friends/family.

And so they should be proud! These children have achieved so much, through being so responsive and willing to give things a go – rising to every challenge.
I hope that further opportunities like this will be available in the community soon. I believe there is a dancer inside each and everyone of us – some big, some small, some confident, some shy – but having the opportunities and freedom to exercise and nurture those dancers is so important because of the positive effects it brings to mental, physical, social and emotional well-being. You only need to look at the smiling, wide-eyed faces of those children involved to see this.

Good luck for the week ahead all! Last leg… Lots of energy, lots of creativity, lots of packed lunches and lots of applause!

Krystal Campbell
Dance Teacher for the ffin dance faktry

Gallery Images

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winter dance faktry festival 2013

winter dance faktry festival 2013

Happy New Year everyone, welcome back to our site.

We have recently put up lovely images of all of our outreach groups from the recent winter dance faktry festival, held at The Met in Abertillery in December 2013.  Please have a browse, and keep visiting the gallery as it’s updated regularly.  Please follow this link