CoActive Arts is a Wakefield based arts collective made up of artistswith and without learning disabilities.
Their goal is to create places of belonging, where the unique humanity, value and potential of each person is recognised, celebrated and encouraged. Skills and talents are developed, achievements are honoured.
They do this through collaborative groups in a wide variety of art forms, performances, exhibitions and training.
What the performance was about a love story between two characters who fell in love over a year, and felt lonely until they met each other. Why we did the performance was for Wakefield Council’s WordFest and also because we wanted to make it into a piece of physical theatre rather than just leaving it on paper, and we created it through lockdown through a small group of writers who were Chantell, Dan, Dylan and Rachael and who the performance was about was Lily and Cedric, but there were other characters such as Lily’s grandma who was called Iris.
The performance group only had four sessions to finalise their performance as part of Wakefield Council’s WordFest.On Thursday 30th September we had five run throughs and we were all exhausted by the end of it, but we knew where to go for each part of our performance and what we had to do. Then on the morning of the performance we had a vocal and physical warmup, before doing another couple of run throughs and then we had to wait patiently backstage before getting into our first positions. I was feeling excited, nervous and confident and I think it went really really well. We were only going to do it once, but then some people came late, so we did it again but it was fine and we smashed it 2nd time round too. There were 8 performers in total, 4 were playing Lily and 4 were playing Cedric. The Lily’s were: Rachael, Debbie, Louise and Chantell, and the Cedric’s were: Dan, Dylan, David Smith and Claire.
The audience of 40 people clapped and cheered at the end, which made us all feel good, and that was just a small version of it, we will be doing a much bigger version of it next year, and we might be doing another version of what we did in the Wakefield Cathedral at some point, which will be good for any who didn’t have chance to come to this one. There’s more information about the performance and what was in it on the CoActive website and blog page at https://www.coactive.org.uk/ or facebook.com/coactivearts.
You can also find out more at this link: https://www.yorkshirefamilies.co.uk/2021/10/05/wordfest-2021-coactive-mini-performance/
