Make Space

About

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” Moby Dick

Make Space 2021 recipients:

Bridie Gane

Bridie Gane is a dance artist and choreographer based in Glasgow, creating dance works with retro theatricality. Bridie has created works with and for diverse performers and audiences and is currently an Associate Artist at Dance Base, Edinburgh. Bridie passionately believes that dance needs to connect with a wide range of people, especially people who don’t feel that dance is for them or have no previous involvement in dance and aims to draw audiences in through quick and sharp choreography, musicality and wit and whimsy in her work.

Bridie’s project, Step hop is an exploration into the freedom and joy of movement in children and young people and what us adults can learn from them. Through Catherine Wheel’s Make Space, Bridie and collaborator Katie Miller will explore as many different ways to skip as humanly possible, looking at the origins of skipping in different dance styles and inviting our audiences to show us their steps (and hops).

Vee Smith & Sadiq Ali

Vee is a Glasgow based circus and performance artist and graduate of the National Centre for Circus Arts where she received a Leverhulme Scholarship. Since graduating she has worked with Australian company Circa on their UK tour of Depart, with Ellie Dubois on her production of Ringside and with Brazilian company Circar: Artes Do Corpo.

Sadiq is a mixed heritage circus artist from Edinburgh. He holds a BA (Hons) in Circus Arts from London’s National Centre for Circus Arts and has subsequently toured internationally with contemporary circus company Ockham’s Razor. Having returned to Scotland last year Sadiq is very excited about bringing his learning and practice back home.

Vee and Sadiq will use this opportunity to develop and research how they would go about making and presenting a queer circus show for children and young people – to develop their established Circus and Live Art practice to look at how we as a sector understand and express queerness in non-sexual ways, what a child-friendly queerness might look, feel, smell and sound like, and what we need to consider when creating work for young audiences.

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About Make Space

The Make Space fund invites applicants from across Scotland and across disciplines who are interested in making work for young people, to investigate new ways of creating and presenting children’s theatre. The funding will support two projects with resources to research and develop new ideas over a 6 month period, supported by the Catherine Wheels’ team.

Make Space is a research and development fund for Scotland-based artists to explore what performing arts for children could look like in the new normal, following the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Make Space 2020 projects

Alison Brown – Hiding Hats
A design-led project, exploring the universal joy in infants from the game Peekaboo.

Memory Monger – Ashley Smith and Simon Donaldson
Researching the need for community in uncertain times through the experiences of two very different characters.

The Hunt (working title) – Ben Winger and Kerry Cleland
Developing an immersive adventure for families, based around a community ‘treasure hunt’.

The Climate Crisis Can’t be Cancelled – Katrine Turner and Fiona Turner
Exploring new ways of creating participatory performance in the school environment with costumes of found materials, interactive “happenings” and a climate summit in a playground.

The Garden – Yvonne Buskie
A design-led project that explores model boxes as an inspiration for storytelling in classrooms.