POSSIB
The core purpose of POSSIB is to work with school aged children and their parents & working aged men to address issues relating to health and wellbeing, through arts experience.
Its aim is to support these groups to develop the confidence and desire to influence service providers understanding of their needs and influence policy. POSSIB works through the medium of Welsh and English and supports the development of welsh language awareness and vocabulary through arts activity
Activities
POSSIB have recently published a bilingual storybook Straeon. The stories were created, illustrated and edited by 166 primary school children, inspired by the true life stories of four parents, a grandfather and an uncle. They partnered with CISHeW and Representing Communities for this project, researching what health and wellbeing means to the children taking part in the project.
POSSIB also partnered with Representing Communities to co-produce a theatre project for the Connected Communities Festival in Merthyr Tydfil. Memo… Mono… Move… was a journey through memories, heard through monologues and seen through movement.
This project brought performers aged from 7 – 85 years together with a theatre director and actors from National Theatre Wales to form and perform the monologues. While children from a local primary school worked with Jên Angharad to explore, create and perform the movement based on data collected through interviews with local community members. The performance formed part of an evening of performance and exhibition of art work, photography, audio stories and film called Merthyr Moves
PhotoVoice / Ffotollais was an after school photography project with year 10 pupils of a local high school. The pupils worked with a professional photographer, learning about composition while exploring issues related to their sense of place and their community. The young photographers compiled a portfolio of photographs and curated an exhibition of their work that was included in Merthyr Moves.
All of the above were about local people telling their stories through various art forms. This is very much what POSSIB is about and would be interested in exploring how issue based stories from the communities involved in From Fort to Pit to Port can be shared and curated to form a broader story-scape of commonalities and individualities that relate communities and make them what they are.
Resources
POSSiB has a part time bilingual project manager / producer who is also an experienced movement artist and facilitator, working with the North Merthyr community who has over the past year and a half, developed positive relationships with seven local schools and is looking to expand on this as well as work with working aged men.
The funding for the POSSIB was a partnership bid by 3g’s Development Trust and Theatr Soar through a portfolio bid brought together by Voluntary Action Merthyr Tydfil and therefore it has a number of agencies to connect with in engaging local people in its arts activity.
Theatr Soar is managed by Menter Iaith Merthyr Tudful (the regional Welsh Language Enterprise) and can offer a translation service to the project.
POSSIB has a small activity budget and can bring a proportion of this to the project.
Contact details
Jên Angharad Project Manager & Producer
Theatr Soar
Canolfan Soar
Pontmorlais
Merthyr
Tydfil
CF47 8UB
Email: jenangharad@gmail.com / possib@merthyrtudful.org
Tel: 07595 024339 / 01685 722176