Reader in Creative Writing, Lucy English has received a substantial Arts Council Strategic grant to fund a tour of her latest project ‘Count Me In’.
‘Count Me In’ is a multi-media spoken word production with a community facing element. Lucy will be working with Bristol spoken word artists, Glenn Carmichael and Sarah-Jane Arbury to create the show, which is based on society’s relationship with numbers.
The grant which is just shy of £30,000 will enable Lucy and the artists to tour twelve rural communities in the South West, running creative writing workshops. The material created in these workshops will be used in the show.
Commenting on receiving the funding, Lucy said: “We are delighted that the Arts Council has agreed to support us. Our previous show ‘Flash’ was highly acclaimed and we aim to stretch the boundaries of spoken word further with ‘Count Me In’.
“It will be exciting to work with communities that do not have much access to the arts and to enable them to create a full length piece of theatre.”
‘Count Me In’ will recruit three undergraduate students from Bath Spa to work on the show. Their experiences will be written up as part of their third year dissertations.
Lucy added: “This is a unique opportunity for our students to work on a ‘real time’ arts project and to understand the whole process of professional creative arts through from the initial idea to finished production.”
Lucy teaches performance poetry at Bath Spa which is the only specialist module in this subject in the UK. Many of her former students, such as Jack Dean, Anna Freeman and Rebecca Tantony are now performing their poetry professionally in the UK.
‘Count Me In’ will tour from September 2013.
