“The Co-Create festival offers York St John students the opportunity to showcase their own work, to facilitate the creative composition of music and drama work with school-age children, and to run workshops for 11-17 year olds”
-Dr Sarah O’Brien, lead organiser
Holly Carter worked with the students of Millthorpe school in York for the Co-Create festival in 2022 and 2023. She visited the school for a number of weeks before the actual date of the festival to work with the students on a performance.
In 2023 the theme of the festival was “transitions”. With this knowledge, Holly began her work with the students with a series of workshops, aimed towards inspiring their creativity and getting them familiarised with the idea of “transitions” and what this means to them. After a few weeks of playing around with ideas, the class was split in half, and the two groups began working on their ideas for performances, with Holly acting as an outside eye and a director.
For the remaining weeks Holly continued doing warmups with the students, in order to keep their minds engaged. The rest of the session would be spent devising and rehearsing, making sure the students were aware of what it would be like performing on the stage at York St John’s creative centre. They were told to project their voices, to work out their stage exits and entrances, and to make compromises in terms of props and staging when moving from their rehearsal space to the main stage.
“Your students were an absolute credit to you – professional, warm and helpful, they worked really well with the students in my class, had some great ideas and were generally just a pleasure to work with. My students performed the devised pieces they had been working on yesterday afternoon and it was clear from the quality of the work they produced that your students had had a big impact on them.” – Katy Sladen, drama teacher at Millthorpe
Holly Carter 