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Dance, Draw and Explore

Crawley, August 2022

Lead artists: Anna Des Clayes and Lorraine Yu

Producer: Jenny Pearce

Creative Director: Louise Blackwell

In summer 2022, Communitas Dance was commissioned by the arts charity, Creative Crawley, to deliver a series of workshops with the refugee and migrant community in Crawley. These workshops involved the creation of tangible artworks to be presented to a five-metre puppet of a refugee child, Aura, who visited Crawley between 11th-14th August. Aura was created by the Yorkshire- based theatre company Animated Objects with Crawley being one of her stops on her tour of the UK.

Our contribution formed part of a larger art project called Aura's Odyssey, involving a wide range of artists who developed stories, dance and music to welcome Aura and to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the new town.

We facilitated five workshops in July and August with participants from the charity Refugees Welcome Crawley Three of the workshops combined sketching and movement with participants, with artworks being collected to be put in a 'memory box' for Aura. The other two workshops involved facilitating the sewing together of over two hundred fabric squares designed by community members and sewn together by volunteers into a large patchwork blanket for Aura.

On the 13th August, we held a free drop-in workshop in the Memorial Gardens for community members. During the workshop we used creative tasks to develop processional choreography that ended with the presentation of the memory box to Aura. Later that day, the patchwork was also presented to Aura by community members in County Mall.