Involving the Schools

Rye Arts Festival is forging closer links with the Studio School and the other schools in Rye. And The Festival is working on an exciting and wide-ranging series of events for and including students in its 43rd annual Festival which this year starts on 12th September.

Rye Arts Festival chairman Ian Graham-Bryce says: “The Festival has been involved with local schools over the years but we have really intensified our activity this year. We are becoming more closely involved with the students and staff of the Studio School as well as maintaining and growing involvement with Rye College and Rye Community Primary School.


As a starting point the Rye Arts Festival has invited two of the Studio School students to not just attend its regular Committee meetings but to play a full and active part in planning for and organising this year’s Festival. “We were delighted to welcome Bella Woodcock and Jade Tate on board back in February,” says Ian Graham-Bryce, “and we have been delighted by their enthusiasm and input already and look forward to working with them over the coming months.”

Jade and Bella have been tasked with helping bring Rye Arts Festival into the 21st century and while the Festival is working on building a new website and, for the first time, online ticketing, they will be charged with improving Social Media, including Facebook. They will also be arranging photography of every event at this year’s Festival, which will be undertaken by the students at the Studio School, plus students’ reports of the events. They will also be overseeing a Rwandan photography exhibition in the Milligan Theatre together with a fashion show with clothing designed and made by the highly talented students.

“There will be plenty for Jade and Bella to do over the coming months,” says Ian Graham-Bryce, “and we hope they will also learn about all those many other things involved in running a Festival such as organising venues, keeping artistes and their agents happy, creating and distributing a brochure, the importance of finance and last but not least running a box office!”

Rye Arts Festival is looking to an even wider involvement with the Studio School, including the staging of the opera La Traviata, which will be sung by a cast of professional opera singers with the music played by a professional orchestra. The opera is being staged by Euphonia Works under the musical and artistic direction of its conductor Alasdair Kitchen – who was responsible for the triumphal Cosi Fan Tutte at Rye Arts Festival two years ago and Iphigenie en Tauride the year before that.
Alasdair is coming to Rye in July to meet with Studio School students, who will be engaged in the set design and then production of paintings as part of the set, as well as supporting the costume design. Ian Graham-Bryce says: “This presents an exciting opportunity for the students to be involved in the complexity of producing an opera and working with 40 or 50 full-time professional musicians through the initial ideas to the final production.”

Rye Arts Festival is also arranging two theatre companies to come to Rye who will not only be providing performances for the public to attend but will also put on workshops and performances just for students. The Chicken Shed Theatre Company is bringing its play The Rain that Washes that was huge critical success at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and will engage students from the Studio School and Rye Academy. And Big Bite Theatre, which also entertained audiences for three weeks at Edinburgh last year, will be collaborating with Rye’s students. The company specialises in 10-minute plays and will work with the students to produce their own work.

And Voces 8, a choral group that sing classical songs a capella, will be holding a workshop with students at Rye Academy and the Studio School, who will then join them for their concert at Winchelsea Church to sing one song for the public, paying audience. Further student involvement is being offered in a Flamenco dancing workshop – Rye youngsters will be given a chance to perform with other older Ryers this highly charged dance style.

In addition, one of the country’s UK’s most popular authors in terms of library books borrowed (he’s in the UK Top 20 for 2013), is Ian Whybrow. And he will be working specially with the children of Rye Primary. Include a Fine Arts Show in the foyer of the Milligan Theatre curated and created by Studio School students and there is a packed programme of events across all the arts involving and being performed for the students at Rye’s three schools.

For a week of the Festival the Piatti Quartet will be coming to Rye, performing with other guest musicians in a series of concerts in and around Rye. However, the Piatti will also be doing outreach work and are keen to work with young musicians and will provide workshops for budding quartets from the Rye area and the whole of the county through East Sussex Music Services, which will be financed by Rye Arts Festival.

And Rye Dance Academy will be doing their annual show, highlighting the young dance talents from the town, as a delightful and inspiring and long-time integral fixture in the Festival. And this year the students at Rye Academy will be preforming the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods as a production that forms part of the Festival’s programme of events.

All of these Rye Arts Festival events build on previous years’ work. Ian Graham-Bryce says: “The public may not be aware that, for example, the two events with the biggest attendance figures last year both took place at Rye Primary with around 340 pupils and children from the school and Rye College being given special workshop performances by young professional classical musicians who were in town to do paid-for concerts as part of the Festival. The musicians involved last year, Katie Stillman and Jessie Grimes got a kick from these performances at the school, and the feedback from the pupils was positive too.

“In recent years performance poet Brian Moses has given separate shows at both Rye Primary and the College; award-winning children’s author Roy Apps led a Great Big Outdoors Story Hunt involving pupils of Rye Community Primary and the educational team at Great Dixter; and internationally-renowned violinist Tasmin Little gave a master-class for students of Rye College and Rye Community Primary. All these and many other events were free for the students as the artistes were paid by the Festival.

“And an anonymous sponsor stepped in to provide tickets for students from the Pestalozzi School in Seddlescombe to attend concerts – it was very exciting to have students quite literally just off the plane from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Nepal, for example, being exposed to live opera and classical music for the very first time in their lives and discovering their response. We hope to continue this involvement with the school in 2014.”

But it is certain that this year’s Rye Arts Festival kicks off with youth involvement, with a procession through the streets of Rye on Friday 12^th September acting as a curtain riser. All Rye’s schools are going to take part in the procession which will feature the exciting drumming and percussion talents of Rye Blocco. 

“It is highly fitting that the students should be launching the Festival this year since they are going to play such a large and active involvement in what we hope will be the biggest and, more importantly, best Rye Arts Festival, which we hope will offer something for everyone,” says Ian Graham-Bryce.