Spilt Ink developed Home at Trinity in collaboration with local school children

Spilt Ink Theatre, a trio of performers who specialise in movement, clowning and puppetry, created a new piece of work for children through a paid Trinity commission. The company worked in collaboration with a local school to develop a movement piece called 'Home’ - a piece that would celebrate the many cultural heritages of children in Bristol.

"My 4-year-old was totally engaged, repeating the keywords from the main character. She even wrote her own letter!"

Split Ink embedded themselves in the school. Many children felt anxious at first, having recently experienced disruption due to Lockdown restrictions however, through small group workshops, games and storytelling activities the children increased their confidence. As part of the journey children shared their own stories, many of whom had experienced the themes explored in Home, such as experiencing migration.

The final part of the development of the work saw the company inviting the children, their teachers and their families to Trinity to see a preview of the performance Summer 2021. As part of the post-show discussion the children shared their own insight into the themes of flight, home and belonging.

Having developed the seed of Home, Spilt Ink are now in the process of realising this into a full length children’s performance to be completed in collaboration with local school children and presented at Trinity in 2022.

Lullabies is a project by Associate Artist Roxana Vilk, connecting people around the world through lullabies.

Inspired by singing traditional Iranian lullabies to her children at night, Roxana wondered how many other families where singing lullabies in the many languages spoken across Bristol. In 2018, Roxana began to collect lullabies with local families, during her IGNiTE residency at Trinity.

In 2020, the project was selected to be part of the Nationwide Here & Now project, celebrating 25 years of The National Lottery. Roxana continues to collect, record, and share lullabies from around the world, using them to find common ground between different communities and cultures.

You can take part in the project and be part of an online exhibition sharing Lullabies from across the world.  Submit yours online here.

IGNiTE resident Ania Varez describes her practice as 'community-engaging'

I want to give people in England a point of contact with a crisis that is largely undocumented in the UK. Ania Varez

Ania Varez is a Venezuelan artist who trained in classical dance and moved to Bristol in 2015 having graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School, before moved away from performing dance towards more participatory projects that explore issues of migration and loss.

We supported Ania during our 2018 IGNiTE Artists residency programme to develop her project Guayabo (Venezuelan slang for heartbreak). This was a participatory work that invited people to gather around their pain and the pain of others, challenging our ways of acting and caring for one another through geographical distance or cultural differences, as a medium of survival, transformation and belonging.

We really liked Ania's reasons for applying for an IGNiTE residency:

"The experience of leaving my home in the midst of a severe humanitarian crisis and facing the challenges of being an immigrant in the UK, as well as witnessing the current migration crisis worldwide, has strengthened my urgency to develop a practice for these issues to be addressed collectively and creatively, here in England."

Women Wise - photo credit Richard Worts

I have so far created work which has women’s mental health as its core theme.  This is such an important subject to me and I believe I can raise further awareness and add to the debate through the dance theatre Untold creates.

Vicki Hearne

Vicki Hearne is a the creative director of Untold Dance Theatre, an all female intergenerational company based in Bristol. Untold strive to create entertaining, emotive, visceral and accessible dance theatre for all audiences.

As one of four IGNiTE 2018 Artists in Residence, Wicki worked with experienced and novice female dancers with an age range spanning 23 to 72 to explore the variables, similarities and differences in how the idea of perfection manifests itself at different stages of ones life.

As part of her residency Vicki created a new piece (working title) Practically Perfect. The project focsued on the idea of perfectionism, the journey to strive for this unattainable goal and how this affects women in particular.

Alongside this, Vicki continued to develop her outreach project: The Confidence Project, delivering movement and arts workshops to women.

We really liked her desire to explore the idea of perfection in an intergenerational dance project.

Viki Browne during her residency at the University of Gloucester

I tend to work from what feels like the most difficult or sticky area of my thinking and whenever I’m like: ‘No, I’m not going there’, I’m like: ‘Oh, here we go! Viki Browne

Viki Browne is a performance artist who creates work about topics that are uncomfortable, risky or taboo.

As part of her 2018 IGNiTE artist residency, Viki focused on developing a new project Hyper Fem which considers whether the performance of femininity through drag can be as powerful, political or subversive when performed on a female identifying body.

The new piece was strongly inspired by some of her recent previous projects which involved wigs, Drag and performing as a "make up girl in a tiny dress".

Hyper Fem challenges restrictive gender norms dictated and commodified by the patriarchy.

How Viki describes her work:
“I thought: ‘I like that, I want that, I don’t know why it feels really naughty and forbidden. This is really difficult and feels very against my personal feminism. So I started making work about that. That’s what I’m bringing to IGNiTE – furthering my thinking about the performance of femininity and wether that can be a political and subversive performance, particularly if femininity is positioned on a female body”

Ella Mesma

"I am super happy to be coming back to my Bristol Roots. It will be a very special project for me to be working in my home town and getting to know the community."  Ella Mesma

During her 2017 IGNiTE Artist residency, Ella Mesma used Latin, HipHop and Contemporary dance theatre to explore what it is to be a 'citizen of the world' and challenge notions of belonging, home, identity and coming of age as other through her project Foreign Bodies.

Ella discovered dance at Cotham school in Bristol, then trained at Laban and The Place, graduating with a postgraduate diploma in 2011. She also has a Politics and Sociology degree from Leeds University.

In 2013, she was selected as a future Dance Leader for the ABLE leadership program and in 2015, awarded a Bench fellowship for emerging female choreographers. She has trained internationally in Cuba, Brazil and USA including The Graham school- New York, La Ena- Havana, Deborah Colker- Rio De Janeiro and Funceb- Salvador da Bahia.

Credits include Russell Maliphant Company, Southpaw Company, Professional cast of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, Wendy Houston, poet Warsan Shire, Adidas, and apprentice for Upswing Circus. She established Latin company Element Arts in Leeds in 2005 and has produced Roots of Rumba (an annual Latin Dance Theatre Festival) since 2013.

Sara Dos Santos

Following a successful career as a performer Sara Dos Santos commenced choreographing in 2011. Her thought provoking and emotionally charged work incorporates a variation of urban contemporary styles and raises awareness to social and political affairs.

Sara was awarded The Neriah Kumah Legacy GiG supported by One Dance UK, enabling her to travel to Brazil on a International exchange project to work alongside four astonishing dance companies and organisations across the country.

Over the course of the IGNiTE 2017 residency Sara worked to research and develop a new piece entitled Journies - A site specific piece incorporating an array of cross-generational artists working together to investigate, create and discuss submerged topics influencing our ever changing society.

Visit the artist's website to find out more.

Caroline Williams

Caroline Williams is an artist working in multi-disciplinary participatory performance. Her work focuses on current political issues. Using personal stories, she works to find the best way to powerfully communicate the heart of those stories.

At the core of her work is a passion to give an artistic platform to people who wouldn't necessarily think of themselves as artists. She is the lead artist of International Activities Club a company focusing on cross-cultural participatory performance.

Caroline used her time at Trinity to dive head first into creating experiments around the notion of ethnic segregation in Bristol and exploring what happens on a personal level and to communities through naming segregation before trying to break it apart through devising new patterns of communication and exchange.

2017 dance workshops hosted at Trinity by Latisha Cesar with Peniel Guerrier

"Historically Trinity has been a refuge for the outcast and has been known to stretch the boundaries of social acceptability. I feel it is only fitting that I explore my shame with a community that has never been mainstream but has always been accepting"

Latisha Cesar

Latisha Cesar is dancer and dance teacher that has studied, taught, and performed in the US, UK, Brazil. A native New Yorker, she studied dance at Lehman College at City University New York.

During Latisha's 2017 residency the artist developed Barye - a project that offered an introduction of Haitian culture to communities based in and around Trinity.

The programme included workshops and a sharing of traditional Haitian drumming and dance. The project also explored the themes of taboo, shame and the barriers that come with being other.

Visit the artist's website for more info

Uninvited Guests

Uninvited Guests are a Bristol-based company led by Paul Clarke, Richard Dufty and Jessica Hoffmann who took part in our 2017 IGNiTE Summer residencies programme.

"We intend to engage local participants in the process of creating and contributing to the project and we would like to conduct workshops with key community groups to develop the overarching narrative, to create the piece and to test its participative elements." Uninvited Guests

They create entertaining and provocative performance that combines high-tech with low tech, the visceral with the virtual and work in various contexts, focusing mainly on theatre and producing installation and audio walks.

Their work blurs the line between theatre and social festivities, with audiences joining in events that are celebratory and critical of the current times and they have toured nationally and internationally.

As part of their residency they worked on developing a new small-scale touring participative theatre piece (To Those Born Later, working title) about the legacy we leave our families, communities and society.

During this R&D phase they focused on creating the piece with the involvement of Trinity’s groups and that was stage as a public sharing for audiences in February 2018.

Art in Motion

“This opportunity will give us time and space to explore our common interest in the impact environments have on society and in imagining possible futures”. Helen Grant, Back in 5 Minutes Squad

Art in Motion and Back in 5 Minutes Squad - two very different artists groups based at Spike Island Studios in Bristol - worked together for the first time to produce an epic, evolving installation during their 2017 IGNiTE Summer residency.

Back in 5 Minutes Squad make immersive installations that imagine possible futures, taking a toungue-in-cheek look at the post-apocalyptic, the nihilistic, the existential and the revolutionary through the lens of popular culture.

Art in Motion is a not-for-prophit participatory arts organisation established in Bristol in 2013. The purpose of AIM is to provide opportunities for artists with learning disabilities to engage with contemporary multidisciplinary arts to explore ideas and concepts with a specific focus on heritage the built environment and a sense of place.