Stan's Cafe - Education Work

Education Work

Since its earliest days, Stan's Cafe has worked in education settings. The first of its large scale devised shows was When In The Future They Look Back At Us, a piece of visual theatre devised with students at the Emmbrook School in Reading.

For a while, the company mostly ran workshops to support its touring shows. Then it moved to making videos and stop frame animations, following a commission to make Head to Head with Foxhollies Special School. No Walls Just Doors, a piece of visual theatre with a soundtrack by Brian Duffy, was devised with Stage 2, mac's youth theatre. This piece was followed by an adaptation of Claire Dowie's monologue into a poly-vocal piece for thirteen performers. Theatre shows were also devised with undergraduates at Demontfort University (three), Warwick Arts Centre and Coventry University.

The initiation of Arts Council England's Creative Partnerships program led to an increase in the company's education work and its move away from performative traditions.

In 2002, Stan's Cafe was tasked to develop a day-long experience that would explore the role of risk-taking in creative learning for teachers from the 26 schools working as part of this initiative. The company devised a Risk Day, where teachers working in pairs where given a series of choices that guided their navigation around and through Birmingham city centre, collecting observations and encounters, to an end point in Digbeth at the Chuck Works (Stan's Cafe base) and then the Custard Factory, where the Creative Partnerships is located.

In 2004, School Rulers with Castle Vale School created ten artworks in collaboration with students that addressed those student's concerns around school. The same year, Stan’s Café devised Plague Nation, a spin-off from Of All The People In All The World, initially with four schools in Birmingham, Bristol and Nottingham. In each case, a class of 30 or so school students from Year 9 (13–14 years old) collaborated with their teachers and performers from the company to create an installation out of 989 kg. of rice. This version of the project has been written about in a number of studies of Theatre-In-Education-Practice. In 2009, Space Steps saw The Steps Series transform Beaumpnt Leys School into a space ship. In 2011, Fruit and Veg Cities saw children from Forestdale Primary School create city scape diorama from fruits and exhibit them in the Birmingham's bullring markets.