Beating off some fierce competition from over 400 organisations across Europe, renowned Scottish Children’s Festival Imaginate has won highly coveted funding for its new 2-year project PUSH that will be delivered in collaboration with 4 Partners from Belgium, Ireland, Norway and Denmark with imaginate as Lead Partner.
PUSH will offer artists high quality, international opportunities to explore three important topics and initiate new artistic ideas. These three topics are:
• Identity – Using performance to explore gender and sexuality with children… and questioning whether the subject should be explored at all.
• Borders – Asking how we can talk about migration and asylum with audiences, including minority voices, in a sector that is not yet diverse and a context that is highly political.
• ‘Safety Zones’ – Investigating how we can protect children without restricting their childhood, balancing risk and protection, wildness and safety and taking shows outside theatre spaces.
Creative Development Director of Imaginate Fiona Ferguson, said, “PUSH has been created as a response to an ongoing conversation within the young audiences’ sector about creating work that is excellent and relevant, reflecting who we are in all our diversity. It’s exciting to be able to bring together our most brilliant artists from all five partner countries to explore new ideas with young people, artistic leaders, non-arts professionals and the public. We want to see bold work for this most important of audiences.”