Arts
Sound It Out - Infusion Project
Sound It Out is the Community Music Development Agency for the West Midlands. We offer dynamic and vibrant music opportunities, by connecting people who have little opportunity to make music with musicians who want to inspire them and new audiences who want to hear them.
From November 2005 to August 2007 Sound It Out received funding through the ESF’s Equal Programme to run Infusion, a training and development programme for exiled musicians followed by a series of music workshops and performances in community centres across Birmingham with the aim of combating prejudice towards refugees and asylum seekers, raising awareness of different cultures and promoting interculturality.
Find out more about Sound it Out
New Growth – Women in Art
This Project delivered a series of workshops for women from Asylum backgrounds to work collaboratively with host community women.
The Project explored techniques such as automata and contemporary textile design and furniture design, each delivered by a specialist artist within each field.The Project began with women making colourful ceramic and metal seeds and flowers, suggesting themes of growth and new beginnings.
The women then went on to learn new fabric collage techniques and created images of fruit, flowers and seeds as well as portraits of themselves and their children, communicating their own sense of identity.
Find out more about the Women in Art project
Strangers in Paradise Circus
From November 2005 to March 2007 Banner Theatre developed a new multimedia documentary theatre production, Strangers in Paradise Circus, based on the stories of asylum seekers in Birmingham and Solihull.
The company was awarded contracts by Birmingham & Solihull Learning Skills Council as part of the Arts strand of the ASPIRE Development Partnership to part-fund the production, with approximately £70k of funds from the ESF’s Equal Programme. The company also secured £105k match funding from Arts Council England, the Baring Foundation, Birmingham City Council, Lloyds TSB Foundation and a range of trade unions and other trusts and foundations.
Find out more about Strangers in Paradise Circus
