Meet the Network: Make the Sunshine

10 September 2024

As an organisation, Make the Sunshine grew out of trying to re-imagine everyday spaces, bringing imagination into everyday routines, and finding new ways to connect communities together. We started off in school playgrounds, looking at that space where children and adults gather twice a day, and re-imagining what it could be.

We were keenly aware of the lack of engagement in theatre for young people in our area (despite our close proximity to Glastonbury Festival), and we knew that for many this came down to access, cost, and lack of opportunity.

“We began bringing artists on playgrounds in the morning, as families arrived – pigs, astronauts, pirates, who animated and disrupted the normal flow of things – intersecting the morning hum drum, bringing that interaction and joy between children and parents, and most importantly reclaiming the playground as a place of play and imagination.”

All the World’s Our Playground Festival grew out of this. It’s about re-animating local spaces – the library, the marketplace, the high street, car parks – and about creating something magical. And best of all, it is all curated and selected by young people.

Children are the best audiences. They say what they think. Their emotions are overt. They are insightful and wise, but also uninhibited. We wanted to create a programme that really resonated with young people and inspired local audiences – something that put creativity and imagination at its heart, the kind of work that brings communities together, that gets audiences talking to the person next to them – and we knew to do this we needed children at the lead of our work.

After working with a range of Shepton Mallet Schools and Headteachers for a few years, we began to look at how we could give young people more of a role in leading and curating our creative programmes. This began with whole school votes to choose festival acts. We then established a programme called Arts Ambassadors – training young people to explore programming, marketing and arts. Young people are selected by teachers from across 8 local schools to participate in the programme.

For our fifth year we have been lucky to greatly expand this programme, working with 10 mainstream primary and specialist schools. Thanks to support from Arts Council England, each school had its own programming panel, with young people hosting performances in their school or local community – designing posters, inviting audiences (ranging from older adults to nurseries, other schools to the local community), and hosting the events, as well as leading Q&A sessions with artists.

This year was also the fifth anniversary of our festival, All the World’s Our Playground. During the event we hosted 21 artists across two days, and the programme was entirely selected by young people. Before we started the programming, we talked about what concepts and ideas might be important in a festival for our community. Here’s what we came up with: fun, imagination, environment, inclusivity, diversity, and the “wow” factor!

We put out an open call to artists, and had such a great response that we hosted two programming sessions this year. In the sessions, we shared artist videos and images, and talked through the acts. Each artist had provided an info sheet to give young programmers the core info they needed, and each programmer had a star allocation to spend on the artist they preferred.

When asked about what being a young programmer means, some of the children who participated in the programme responded:

“It means a lot because we get to plan activities and make people happy, as well as making sure that everyone has their say – no matter who or what you are, you are important. Young people don’t always get recognised, a lot of others say it’s for older and more important people, but we are all important and different in our own special way” – Leo, Young Programmer, Age 9

Poppy, aged 11 said: “Normally adults decide what they think is best for young people, but they might not actually know what we like. So when young people make the decisions, they’ll be able to get it accurate for other children to enjoy the shows.”

As part of the process, young people also work towards an Arts Council England Arts Award Qualification from Trinity College London.

In the five years that the festival has been running, we’ve hit a fair range of challenges. Our first festival was in March 2020 – the day before the national lockdown was announced. A kind of blissfully surreal time. It made the before and after seem even more pronounced. We managed to keep going during the covid years – moving to July, and to outside events only, with limited entry, for 2021. By 2023, we were back to hosting the festival across the town centre and a local school site – St Paul’s Junior School – but were blighted by lightning and high winds.

We’ve been so lucky with our supporters: many of our volunteers have been supporting the festival since our very first event. But finding the budget to run these things is always a challenge. As an organisation, we have no core funding, so we are reliant on project grants. This year we were lucky enough to be supported by Arts Council England, Shepton Mallet Town Council and local supporters. This means that we could offer young people a chance to work with amazing artists and a far broader selection of artists to choose from, and they could really push the boundaries in terms of the range of performance pieces.

Highlights from this year included the Market Place being transformed into a cardboard craft paradise with Sam Wilde’s Cardboard Adventure amazing show Boxville, Matt Pangs Those in Glass Houses, Circo Rum Ba Ba’s giant whale taking resident in Collett Park, incredible European circus troupe Collective ConTakt performing some incredible acrobatic feats (thanks to support from Take Art and Circus Around and About 2), and some wonderfully inventive walkabouts and happenings such as Crow’s Next Theatre’s show, created entirely out of soap suds!

We would love to bring more national and international artists to the festival. Being part of the Without Walls Creative Development Network has been an amazing opportunity for us to network with other companies and artists, and to establish some more national links and gain some insight into some larger scale festivals.