Care home residents share Shadow Theatre creations through online festival

Elsie is coming to the end of her story about taking her heart to visit the forest. She looks up at the rainbow she is reflecting onto the ceiling. Elaine, her carer in Figham House, the residential care home where Elsie lives, asks her softly where would like to send her heart now. Elsie smiles. “To my lover,” she says. And then she laughs.

When the Covid pandemic shut down the Beverley Public Festival as a three-day live event in July, founder Anna Ingleby and co-director Kerrin Tatman decided to take it online in a new and untested format.

Their vision was not to reproduce the performances that would have taken place, but to offer two months of puppetry workshops creating activities for children and adults stuck at home due to the pandemic along the festival theme “Back to Nature”.

But, if this were not challenging enough for the organisers, they still wanted to deliver the education outreach project they have traditionally offered to community centres, care homes or schools in the local community in every past outing of the biennial festival. This year the idea was to bring shadow theatre to at least three care homes in the town and give residents the chance to express themselves creatively. 

Now, in a new, remotely managed pilot project, those three care homes and two sheltered housing projects have received a specially designed shadow theatre kit including a box shadow theatre, puppets, a lamp, a special torch, coloured gels and landscapes, and materials for residents to create their own puppets. All of these can be easily sanitised between participants’ use.

The project has been designed and managed by Anna’s own company, Indigo Moon Theatre, and she and her artistic co-director, Haviel Perdana, have collaborated to produce a 30 minute video shot in the UK and Indonesia to explain how the kit – and other objects from the house or garden -  can be used to create landscapes, characters and stories inspired by the natural world.

Thanks to the commitment and cooperation of carers in the homes, the kits are already proving a great success.

“We couldn’t have done this without them,” says Anna Ingleby. “They have really taken this project to their hearts.

“Isolation is already a problem for the elderly, and now, with the lock down, it‘s even worse. But the shadow theatres are allowing them to rediscover their creativity and enter an imaginative world that might have become closed off to them before now. There’s no pressure in using the kits, no right or wrong thing to do anything or strict rules to follow. And the videos and photos the carers take are a way their residents can share something of themselves with the world outside"

"This isn’t how we expected our ninth festival to play out when we began planning it... but, coincidentally, we discovered another Elsie of just ten years old is also one of the first to have her work also posted in our other growing festival gallery of our audience’s own uploaded creations on www.beverleypuppetfestival.com!"

"We hope that this online festival is the start of something new, something that won’t replace the live performances, but can enhance future festivals and make them even more inclusive".