...collaborating with people and places to imagine and grow puppetry & visual performance art
Early Years - Magic Acorns
‘Magic Acorns encounters the world with children. Learns what children can do from children and learns what Art can do by listening to children’.
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Magic Acorns is an emerging EY Arts development organisation working in partnership with Great Yarmouth Community Trust & supported by Festival Bridge delivering arts creation, CPD & networking events with partners. Our vision & objectives developed from recommendations made by the ‘Early Years Arts Activity in East Anglia Mapping Project’ undertaken in 2016/17 commissioned by Festival Bridge.
Magic Acorns aims to distinguish early childhood through arts based practice, make the EY sector visible and champion those who work within it. Magic Acorns aims to make great art & culture accessible to children of 0-5, their parents and the communities that surround them. We pioneer world-facing, multi-model creative work and make it in partnership with young children. We advocate the fundamental importance of EY arts to the health and wellbeing of all.
Early childhood is a space and time in its own right rather than a developmental stage to somewhere else. Young children are highly discerning audiences and participants, and have diverse knowledges that are valuable and relevant to art making generally, and critical for informing the educational and arts policies that affect early childhood.
Early Years -
Near & Far
Artists Residencies
‘giving them freedom and seeing what they make of it’.
Practitioner - Priory Day Nursery
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Near & Far was an exploration intimate connections between small children, parents, and educators when attention is closely focused on each other and also to discover what happens when we journey outwards and share experiences together.
Over three week-long residencies in 2018 six artists worked with very young children and the communities that surround them in nursery settings and cultural spaces in Somerset supported by Hopper Take Art, and in Norfolk with Great Yarmouth Community Trust nurseries in partnership with Time & Tide & Norwich Castle Museums.
‘A space like the museum it is very easy to enter into and not feel ownership because you are being asked to absorb too much information. This process has enabled participants to enter the museum (which is very good and stimulating) and extend outwards through the children’s interactions’. Jaz - Artist
The residencies developed cross-arts and multi-modal practice, bringing together dance, puppetry, music, visual arts, interactive scenographic and digital artists within a collaborative process.