Activities

Balagan works with children aged between 9 and 18, recruited mainly from schools in the London Borough of Lambeth. We present 1-2 new music theatre projects per year. Before joining Balagan, many of our participants had little or no music making or drama experience either at school or at home. We are committed to giving these children the chance to have access to these creative activities. Balagan recognises that the context in which it works is a decline of art in schools, and a dearth of new educational musical theatre suitable for school use. Therefore the company wish to contribute to the creation of such resources.

Workshop activities usually include: a certain amount of improvisation and devising of new material; developing skills in drama; learning challenging new music, with a strong emphasis on developing vocal technique; solo and group work; playing musical games; and recording new material written by the young people. We also make recordings of new work written for the company by Marc Forde. creative and collaborative aspect of the project is not only immensely enjoyable but has broad educational benefits in terms of raising self-confidence and developing social skills. There is the added benefit in that our projects, because of them being seen as fun and not work, can also help some children with their literacy skills.

Aside from our recordings, Balagan have also put on many performances of new work, often producing comprehensive literature to accompany these projects. This has included songbooks about drug awareness and recordings of songs written by the children themselves. Our work has been seen at the South Bank Centre and Jackson's Lane Community Centre.

Artitude, Brazil

In January 2009 we ran a pilot project on the edge of one of the biggest slums in Salvador, Brazil to see whether we could take what we have learnt working in south London to a completely different location. The results were surprising. The area where we were working was extremely challenging and brought it a lot of issues that we had not faced working in Lambeth. We have called our Brazilian arm of Balagan, Artitude, and we will run projects over January and February for the foreseeable future.

Music and theatre is not taught in the majority of Brazilian state schools, although the children were very musical, since music is all around with street bands and many local festivals. The young people were also not at all shy about getting up and having a go at anything we threw at them, be it singing, a drama improvisation or dance choreography. Our British artistic director (a fluent Portuguese speaker and keen unicyclist) was also lucky enough to find a tutor from Salvador with whom to run the project. As well as being a tutor, he is also an actor who specialises in street theatre, puppetry and acrobatics. These were all skills that we were able to use in our workshops.

Since our first project, we have developed this work, and now have the collaboration of the local library and cultural centre, as well as a choir run by the singing professor at the local university. As well as participating in music and theatre, the theme of the project is also about taking an active interest in the world in which we live, as well as being about improving self-confidence and self-worth.

Latest Releases

The Chalk Circle

The Chalk Circle (by Marc Forde) was inspired by the Brecht play The Caucasian Chalk Circle. This musical can be enjoyed by children (and adults!) of different ages, and follows the story of a maid (Grusha) and the troubles...