Art & Story – Visual Art & Theatre Workshops

In these workshops the participants engage in a variety of theatre games, including physical theatre and improvisation. The games are the launching points for explorations of visual arts, including paintings, installations, sculpture, architecture and landscape. The theatre play can also be a launching point for investigation and exploration of history: local, personal, site-specific or exhibition-presented. Workshops can be developed for your site.

Past Presenters: Heide Museum, Heritage House Museum, Albury Library-Museum

Participants can then create installations, play-make using puppetry and other forms of theatre, create a work of visual art – either collaboratively or as individuals.

In these photographs, you see children at Heide gallery in Melbourne collaborating on a painting, in a workshop facilitated by Barking Spider Artistic Director Penelope Bartlau. Together, the children have come up with the painting’s theme, concept, and ideas for how to execute the work.They decided on “Apples and Dragons” as the theme, drawn from an improvised story we told collaboratively earlier in the workshop. The children’s painting has been stimulated by artworks at Heide Gallery, in particular works of Mirka Mora, Albert Tucker and John Olsen.

“Barking Spider Visual Theatre artists have passion and enthusiasm, demonstrating their capacity to create workshops for children and responding to specific educational outcomes, even with short notice. Their responses to the themes are original and creative, greatly adding to the program I run at Heide. Above all, Barking Spider Visual Theatre artists are all wonderful with children, who fully engage and interact with the material they present”.

Christine Healey, Education Co-ordinator, Heide Museum.