doncaster attachment | Barrel Organ Theatre

Co-Creating & Exploring Long-Term Engagement in Doncaster

With our partners Doncaster Mind and the City of Doncaster Council, Barrel Organ sets out on a 6-month Participation Programme, working with Refugees & Asylum Seekers recently arrived in Doncaster, young people from the city & our newly former Doncaster Advisory Panel.

"We listen to each other. We seem to understand each other. We have different ways of explaining the same thing.”

Campfire participant

Why Us: Our Experience Working with the Communities in Doncaster & Further Afield

We are currently a Sheffield-based theatre company, with a track record of making politically-engaged, formally-innovative work that centres collaboration and foregrounding voices which don’t otherwise get heard. We currently do this all over the UK, with ongoing projects in Bradford, Coventry & Dover. We have an established history of collaborating with the community in Doncaster, having run our ‘Campfire’ project with Doncaster Mind since 2022, with partners including Cast, The Postcode Neighbourhood Trust, The Trans Pennine Trust and the RSPB Old Moor!

We are passionate about platforming the voices of Doncaster communities in cultural practice, and are seeking funding to both work with 3 different groups (DM Refugees & Asylum Seekers, CDC YP & DAP) over the next 6 months and to conduct a rigorous feasibility study on whether it would be beneficial for BO to become based in Doncaster more permanently.

Since 2022, we have worked in the city on the following:

With DM to develop and deliver ‘Campfire’, which works with Mind service users to develop and share creative writing as a way of improving mental health & wellbeing. Our Co-Director Ali Pidsley has also worked independently with DM on a number of storytelling groups, and through these projects we have also worked with a number of creative practitioners in Doncaster.
Sharings at Cast, presenting DM work & last year holding a Book Launch event for a book we made of co-created writing from Doncaster residents.
With Art Bomb, who this month have been hosting an exhibition ‘The Mind’s Eye: Artistic Visions of Mental Health’ featuring the BO book & other work made by participants we’ve worked with.
Field trips to local spaces - Flourish’s Walled Garden, RSPB & Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Nature Reserves as well as multiple theatre trips to Cast.
Through our LIVE Artist Development programme & informal mentorship we have supported the establishment of 2 Doncaster-based companies: The Growth House & Mad Friday Productions.

This project will enable us to continue to work with local partners & participants to co-create new work, but in a broader context, reaching more people with a permanent exhibit at Cusworth Hall, and working with local people in a much deeper way than what we have previously been able to offer.

Our Town Squared project in Leighton Buzzard & Dover has also demonstrated to us the value we can have as an organisation by taking a cross-sector approach, being embedded in a specific place, and drawing on our extensive facilitation experience to build something new. We have experience through Town Squared of working with Local Councils to facilitate this cross-sector approach & in this instance we have the added advantage of already having some cross-sector relationships in place, meaning that the community-embedded work can be deeper, and longer-lasting.

Through our current Heritage Fund project ‘ilo’, we have experience working with participants with limited English proficiency, & are receiving significant support & guidance form our Trustee Ethel Maqueda who has extensive experience in teaching ESOL & working with Refugees & Asylum Seekers. This project will build on this, & combine this kind of work with another important strand of our output which is working with Mental Health charities & service users, leading to new & urgent insights into how best to support these marginalised communities.

We have experience of setting up & running Advisory Panels, through our existing, ACE-funded Youth Advisory Panel. The DAP as part of this project will build on what we have learnt & provide a geographically localised perspective, & the opportunity to work with community advisors in-person rather than in an online context, something we have learnt via YAP that is beneficial.

Doncaster Advisory Panel

Based on our hugely successful Youth Advisory Panel, the Doncaster Advisory Panel will ensure that community voices from the city are integral to all of our planning & strategic thinking, as well as teaching members about leadership styles & governance.

Feedback from our YAP pilot year includes:

“No other programme I have been a part of, designed for young people, has centred that particular group nor enabled that specific cohort to help mould the engagement. Other programmes have always felt cookie-mould, more concerned with *appearing* to centre young people and not necessarily actually listening to the group in front of them. YAP meaningfully engages, over a long period - a rare opportunity itself - which will enable us to grow together.”

Doncaster Mind - Workshops with Refugees & Asylum Seekers

For the last two years Barrel Organ have been supporting DM Service Users through our ‘Campfire’ project, and in the same period DM have set up their ‘Settle’ Project, supporting recently arrived communities from Ukraine and Afghanistan.

This project will see BO & DM come together again, with BO working with these groups to find non-verbal forms of expression, supporting their mental health through creativity & storytelling. The workshops will also act as ESOL opportunities for participants.

It is our intention that these participants & their views will also feed in to the other, later parts of the project, such as DAP & adding creative content to the Installation.

A letter of support from Doncaster Mind can be found by clicking here.

Marketing copy:

Barrel Organ theatre company and Doncaster Mind join forces again, uniquely bringing expertise in both performing arts and mental health together in a series of workshops to support people in Doncaster with recent experience of migration. The workshops will encourage expression and release of emotion in a safe space, without reference to prior trauma or the need to know English language.

Come along to one of three all-day workshops to have fun, meet new people and most importantly to have a space to express yourself. Our workshops encourage a collaborative and explorative process. Any level of English language is welcome.

City of Doncaster Council Participatory Exhibition

Our proposal is to create a generative audio installation in Doncaster from reading materials, ambient recordings and interviews with young people from the local community.

We will collect the source material for the sound installation by running 12 workshops with three groups of young people. City of Doncaster Council are working with us to identify key target demographics & to recruit the groups from local schools, youth groups & programmes.

The workshops will focus on:

Young people’s perceptions of/ reflections on the past of Doncaster, in particular the 1984-5 Miners Strike 40 years ago & its impact on local communities, industries & culture
Young people's perceptions of/ reflections on present day Doncaster, in particular the granting of City status which happened 18months ago and how/if Doncaster has changed/ adapted since then
Young people’s ideas about the future of Doncaster, in particular what culture & community will look like in the city moving forward, and how industry, energy & politics will shape the city & its communities.
The workshops will span an 80-year period, looking back to 1984, and looking forward to 2065.

We will collaboratively select, editorialise and assemble the audio installation together. These workshops and walkarounds will encourage contributors to explore new areas of their experience, engage with fellow participants in new ways and inject into the conversation around the Miners’ Strike a consideration of the past, present and future.

The resulting audio installation can be adapted to various locations - for example, a larger, multi speaker system that users can freely wander around, or a QR code hosted in a public location which links to an online version of the audio for users to experience privately whilst at the location, or a silent disco style headphone audio experience for individuals or groups of users. The installation can therefore be experienced either as a one-off event experienced by numerous users at the same time, or a long running piece that is accessible online in perpetuity. Through our partnership with and commission from City of Doncaster Council, a version of the sound installation - which audience members will be able to contribute to & interact with - will sit in the permanent exhibition at Cusworth Hall Museum.

A letter of support from City of Doncaster Council can be found by clicking here.

Target Audience

This proposal has two strands of engagement; engaging in the creative workshops & walkarounds, and experiencing the artwork. These are not mutually exclusive and we will encourage crossover. Both the sound collection and the installation will encourage participants to consider their relationship to public spaces in Doncaster, the history of the place & its future. The generative element of the installation means audiences will never hear the same thing twice & will encourage multiple engagements.

The installation will allow people to hear voices they may not normally hear and creates new connections between participants, audiences and members of the local community in Doncaster. The use of local voices is a celebration of the everyday creativity of the public that contributes towards it. It will be an offer of opening up a cultural space to be ‘taken over’ by the local community and encourage dialogue about the Miners’ Strike, its impacts and how those events will ripple into the future.