KEAP news item 8 November 2010
KEAP and Sing Up Cornwall are proud to be hosting visitors from Kenya this week as the beginning of International Voices, an exciting project using singing to develop cultural relationships between international clusters of schools.
Due to the great success of the recent Sing Up Cousin Jack project which brought a sell out audience to the Hall for Cornwall, Cornwall has been chosen as one of only 5 clusters nationally to be part of this next phase- going international!
The project will be run by Sing Up Cornwall and Kernow Education Arts Partnership and is part of International Voices, a strand of Youth Music Voices. It’s a singing-based project that brings schools and artists in the UK together with schools and artists overseas. The project draws on the inspiration of the Olympics and the composers and artists working with Youth Music Voices, the British Council’s international links and existing Connecting Classrooms project.
To kick start the project, a teacher and student from Moi Girls school in Nairobi along with a musician from Sauti Sol, one of the most popular bands in Kenya, will visit Cornwall to share music, songs and ideas, and work with fantastic Cornish musicians from Dalla, and the countywide cluster of schools: Bodmin College, St Petrocs, Trevisker, St Dennis, Boscastle and Threemilestone.
Angela Renshaw, Area Leader for Sing Up said, ‘We are really looking forward to some song swapping sessions! We’re going to teach the children and our Kenyan visitors some Cornish songs reflecting our mining heritage, and we can’t wait to learn some Kenyan songs in return to add to our repertoire’
The Cornish element of the project will focus on our mining heritage in Cornwall, the children learning about working life in the mines through the music linked to them, such as walk to work songs, or songs sung by Bal Maidens. There is also the opportunity to create exciting curriculum projects using the Sense of Place scheme of work developed by Azook. All the work by the children in Cornwall will be shared with Moi Girls school in Kenya via an online platform so we can keep in touch with each other during the project.
The activity will be running until March 2011 and will culminate in a performance by the schools using songs of Cornish origin along with those shared by our Kenyan partners, and also new compositions created just for the International Voices project.
For more information contact Angela Renshaw on keapcornwall@singup.org
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