Background: The Engine Shed Project, a project to turn an old railway building in Wivenhoe into an Arts Centre, is gaining momentum. Over the last year, there have been many successful and varied events, raising both money and awareness of the Project. In fact, through this effort and with grants already promised, £100,000 has so far been raised. A planning application has been submitted and we hope approval will soon be given. The Project has received support and advice from the local organisations and people. Colchester Borough Council, the University of Essex, 'Greyfriars' Adult Community College and Essex County Council Youth Services have all committed themselves to supporting the Project as Project Partners. We have completed phase one of our market research into potential future usage. Wivenhoe Town Council has been involved in the project since the beginning, going back some eight years. Colchester Borough Council has given us valuable advice in terms of dovetailing this project with the overall arts strategy for the Borough and are now closely involved with the Project. The Project mission statement is: 'The Engine Shed Arts Centre aims to provide quality space to encourage creative experiences for a wide range of communities'. Arts Development:
Now that the ethos and aims of the project team have been agreed we decided to start putting our ideas into practice. Creative Arts Fun Day: A series of events and consultation sessions started with a Fun Day on Saturday September 13th. Sounding Out Weekend with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields - 18th /19th October: The second event was a Music and Art creativity weekend for 60 people of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Its purpose is to share knowledge, experience and skills to create a new work and offers a chance to work with top-ranked musicians from the world-class Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. This is the last year of their three year Colchester Residency. The aim of the weekend will be to produce a new piece of work to be performed out the Playing Out Concert in Charter Hall on Saturday, 29th November. For pictures, click here. Playing Out Concert: And finally, this music workshop forms the Autumn part of the Four Seasons project organised by Colchester Borough Council and will be performed on stage at the Playing Out Concert with the Academy at Charter Hall on November 29th.
The Future: We are planning further events at Easter, which will involve further consultation and work with local painters and visual artists. We are developing a network of associated artists. We have already completed a register of the Wivenhoe artists and published details of many of them in the Wivenhoe Encyclopedia web site. The range of activities we hope to represent through this scheme is very wide, from Shamanic drumming to storytelling, to folk musicians to operetta to whatever. We are looking at ways to develop innovative avenues of understanding the history of the area and telling our history through creative work. A start that we hope will deliver the spark to anyone that ever thought: “Maybe I could write a novel or paint a picture or write a play or make art”. Here’s an organisation that believes that you can; all you need to do is to release the brakes and go for broke!
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