Artistic Discoveries in European Schoolyards

EEA 'PENt Up' project launched

EEA writers’ project – PENt Up
The PENt Up project has kicked off and will run throughout February and March. The project aims to bring together professional, aspiring and young writers in a supportive and challenging environment to create new poetry, prose, lyrics and script. This will culminate in a Writers’ Cabaret at the end of March, and text from this will be used in phase 2 when the Final tour comes to London in autumn 2012.
The project is supported by the Clore Duffield Foundation alongside Platform 11+ We are extremely proud to have won support from Clore Duffield, gaining one of only 4 major awards out of 14 overall – and fighting off competition from over 200 applicants.
We started with a creative writing weekend led by PILOT’s playwright Richard Hurford. The workshop entailed identifying with the creative process and exploring how we can expand and manipulate different ideas to gain a better perspective on them. The adults taking part in the project found the weekend both emotional and creatively satisfying. This was very useful for working with the students as it gave us different ideas of techniques we could use with them, and an understanding of the emotions their writing might contain.
We had our first session of PENt Up last week which was run by Andrew “Sid” Siddall and Arji Manuelpillai. The session was based around writing in different settings with different writing tools, and how that might influence your writing style and content. Each of the students took part extremely well and displayed confidence in themselves and respect for each others work. The session concluded with each participant sharing a new piece with the group.
Our aspiring writer and project placement Ricky Sullivan said:
“It has been a very productive start and I think we have already gained a lot from it. I have been extremely impressed at the pace and quality of work that has been produced in our last session.”