We’ve now been touring My Secret Heart for 10 months and everywhere we have gone, organisers and audiences have been amazing. We have just arrived back from a British Council-supported tour of Japan. Together with presentations of the installation at Yokohama’s 150-year celebration festival and Creative Cities Symposium we also screened the 7-minute film at Super Deluxe in Tokyo with Mira Calix and Rob from Flat-e performing a live set.

The presentations of My Secret Heart were only part of the story – the British Council helped us to run workshops with homeless people and artists in Osaka and Yokohama, sharing our model of work and helping to grow and develop the community arts movement. The British Council had also made links with a huge array of social entrepreneurs, artists, support workers, policy-makers and academics to help spread our work as widely as possible. 

The two areas we were working in – Kamagasaki in Osaka and Kotobuki in Yokohama are very isolated areas of homeless and disadvantaged people. Over 90% are elderly men although more and more young people are also living in these areas. With the help of some inspirational social activists (Kanayo Ueda from Cocoroom in Kamagaski and Tomohiko Okabe from Koto-Lab in Kotobuki) we engaged with residents of the area. There was an existing theatre group called Musubi in Kamagasaki and we worked with them to introduce music into their work and to write a song with them which will fit into their new play. We performed this together at the Aqua Festival in Yokohama.

We have felt enormously privileged to be involved in this work – although the community arts movement and the support infrastructure for homeless people is less developed that in the UK, the work on the ground is exceptional and it was an honour to be part of this. A massive thank you to all those we worked with, especially the British Council in Japan for making it happen.

Hi everyone – well the tour has started with a bang! We began with a screening of the 7-minute version in Middlesbrough on the BBC Big Screen on 29th Jan. It was FREEZING! But thanks so much to the Wellington St gang who came out in force to perform some numbers for the premiere. The piece is going to be on all the BBC Big Screens round the country – there are 17 of them in various towns and cities and you can see the full list here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigscreens/

Then last week from 12-14 Feb we had the first leg of the installation tour at the Light Night Festival in Notts. Huge thanks to the Notts group for coming out to take part in the discussion we organised (particularly for your speech Kevin). Then the installation was run for 3 days and a few hundred people came. It looks so awesome when it is playing in a dark room – in this case a church. Amazing. I’ll load some photos onto this site

I’m so proud of what we have achieved and what the Streetwise performers have produced. It is fantastic and so are you!

Next date in the diary is a screening at Tyneside Cinema on 7th March. More info to follow!

Matt

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/nov/28/mira-calix-streetwise-opera

Lovely article – hope you like it everyone!

We’ve just returned from Switzerland where we previewed My Secret Heart in front of 3 sold-out audiences in Lucerne. The brilliant Byker Bridge group came (with performers also from the Streetwise Choir). It was a truly memorable week – the show is beautiful and Emma’s staging fits in really well. Audiences were really complimentary and we even had a visit from the British Ambassador! We were looked after wonderfully all through the week – special thanks to Ursula Jones, Beat Studer and Gerhard Pawlica – not to mention Jimmy and Naddir from Byker Bridge. Congrats to everyone for a terrific review in the Lucerne press!

Over the next few days we’ll upload some photos, more visuals and plans. We’re really looking forward to the premiere at the Royal Festival Hall now – it’s all systems go. It’s exciting to think we’ll be performing with 80 performers rather than 15 and we know all the Streetwise performers are really looking forward to the show. We can’t wait to see you all in London! Oh, and the show sold out today – more than a month before the premiere!
Matt

29th August 2008

A couple of weeks have passed since our 3rd and final intensive week working with all our performers round the country. The last group was in Notts and what a brilliant, touching, week. The performers worked their socks off and we’ve done some brilliant recording/filming. The standard of the singing was truly excellent and hats off to Sarah and Ben for getting the group singing so well.

Back in July we were were at the RFH to host a week working with our 4 groups from London (Passage, Connections, Queen Mary, Crisis) and our Luton NOAH group. Another great week led by Rowan and Sharon and focussing on a lot of acting skills running in parallel with the filming and recording. Lovely to be at the RFH and have pretty much the whole of the basement to ourselves. The week culminated in a really enjoyable trip upstairs to see Wizard of Oz!

At the start of July we were at the Blackfriars Centre in Newcastle – sceen of our rehearsals for Whirlwind in 2006. Great to be back and awesome to see all the groups together from Ron Eager, Byker Bridge, Crisis and ECHG in Middlesbrough. One of the nicest parts of the process has been seeing everyone for all 10 groups meet for the first time. We had another fantastic week here and a lot of the ideas for the filming came from this week.

Now we have film and recordings of about 70 people and it’s all being put together by Flat-e and Mira Calix into our new piece! There should be a taster video on the microsite soon; Multiadaptor the graphic designers are putting together the flyer and Gaianova are busy building the screen.

We’re pulling together the tour dates and things are looking very exciting! More soon…

Matt