Brighton Dome & Festival's Miss Represented awarded Big Lottery Fund
Miss Represented, Brighton Dome & Festival’s flagship project working with young women, has received an award from the Big Lottery Fund allowing the project to expand and develop over the next two years.
Miss Represented operates as an arts collective working with young women who face challenging life situations. Since being established in 2011 it has gone from strength to strength becoming a lifeline to many of its members.
We create a safe space, using the arts as a vehicle to explore life experiences, gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Miss Represented helps young women develop their self-worth, build resilience and discover purpose and passions. Every Thursday at Brighton Youth Centre, Miss Rep starts with us making and eating lunch together, we do a lot of talking and debating about certain themes, we build trust and a family-like vibe that means we can take that leap to sharing and discussing feelings, experiences thoughts and ideas… these develop into tailor made workshops in a whole variety of creative disciplines depending on what we want to do. Somehow, through magical creative alchemy, the various threads and colours of our ideas come together resulting in cross-art exhibitions, events and performances of high artistic quality. We want to reach out into the community embracing common ground and asking questions through the work we make. We want to have a dialogue with the community through the work we make. We seek to shine a light on the young people whose humanity, intelligence and talents have been obscured by simplistic labels and a lack of opportunity to discover their potential.
So far our exciting achievements have included a collaboration with multi-award-winning rapper Plan B, an appearance on BBC Radio 1xtra, a cross art experimental piece of theatre investigating forgiveness, facebook and friendship, a Retrospective of work at Brighton Dome to celebrate International Women’s Day and sell-out performances of our recent show Home: Life which explored experiences of being young and homeless with little or no support system.
Over the next two years Miss Represented will be expanding to reach more young people. We will be developing a new piece of work to take on tour, visiting local schools, theatres and Pupil Referral Units with a performance and Q&A's. We will also be touring Universities using this specialised work as an enhanced learning tool and then taking the show further afield to London and beyond.
The second year will see some of the older long-term members of the project begin to co-facilitate Miss Represented Satellite sessions in Pupil Referral Units and schools. There will also be ongoing creative work and an exhibition, including bringing together video diaries from the tour to reach even more young people through increased Miss Represented online content.
Rebecca Fidler, Creative Learning Manager, Brighton Dome & Festival says: “We are so excited to be able to continue this important and transformative work as we expand and spread our wings. Creating a show is such a powerful process for personal development and group bonding. To now have the opportunity to take this work out into our wider communities and amplify the incredible insight these young women have to offer is just fantastic. It is essential that we, as a society, listen to the voices of these young people and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face and ask ourselves questions about what kind of society we want to live in.”
To find out more about the project visit www.brightondome.org/missrep
You can see more videos and image on the Miss Rep facebook page www.facebook.com/brightonmissrep
If you would like to make contact, please feel free to drop us a line rebecca.fidler@brightondome.org
Blog post by Becky Kempson, Creative Learning Administrator Coordinator, Brighton Dome & Festival
Photos by Lauren Joy Kennett