Stories Season 1

Throughout 2024, we have been exploring how we might galvanise the power of stories to inspire communities, audiences and artists to reflect, interpret and imagine what makes this county unique: its people, heritage, natural environment and histories.

This year there have been 3 strands to our pilot activity – stretching across the county from Buckingham in the north to the Chilterns in the South, with events in woodlands as well as village and town centres, from projects that see artists researching in local archives, to mass participation in local villages.  The three strands were:

  • Archive Stories
  • Fireside Stories and
  • Village Stories.

An overview of each strand is below and we have dedicated pages to share what happened and who took part.

STORIES will grow and develop over the next years into a festival-like series of events and participation opportunities.

Archive Stories

Archive Stories saw spoken word artist Ellen Renton and four disabled artists investigate the National Paralympic Heritage Trust archive and the National Disability Art Collection & Archive to inspire the creation of new artworks. To find out more about Archive Stories and see what our artists have been up to, visit our dedicated page: Archive Stories

Fireside Stories

Fireside brought circus and theatre artists Nikki & JD and Lost Dog to three varied Buckinghamshire Locations: Downley Common, Buckingham Parish Church Yard and Wendover Woods in October 2024. Accompanying Fireside, are writing workshops in schools, storytellers, seasonal and outdoor activities with our partner organisations.

Fireside is a modern retelling of Beowulf and tells a story of monsters and what makes us afraid. A family-friendly performance with real fire. Read more about Fireside Here

Village Stories

Village brought together choreographer Theo Clinkard, photographer Camilla Greenwell and a number of writers to work with local communities on creating new stories and a mass-photoshoot of today’s village life. To find out more about Village Stories and how you can get involved, visit our dedicated page: Village Stories.

STORIES is funded by Arts Council England, Rothschild Foundation, Buckinghamshire Council, National Paralympic Heritage Trust, National Lottery Heritage Fund and supported by a range of committed partners across the county.

Consultation

There will continue to be opportunities to feed into the development of the programme of stories-themed activity. We will share details of meetings and events here in due course. In the meantime, if there is a specific idea, project, space, opportunity etc that you wish to discuss, please contact Lallie.

Previous work inspired by Stories

Summer of Stories, 2021

Our pilot Story Project activity in 2021 focussed on story sharing and celebration.  This involved a number of artists exploring Bucks and developing dialogue with the public with the aim of sharing stories.  You can see more about this project and what it achieved here: https://buckinghamshireculture.org/summer-of-stories/