These Showstoppers portray and celebrate the incredible work happening across all of our LCEPs, and in many cases have been produced by the young people we work with.

Riverside 

Derby Theatre & The Plus One Programme

Riverside was co-created by Derby Theatre alongside young people from the Plus One Programme, that works to support care-experience young people. They were involved in all aspects of the production. In this video you will see an edited version of the performance that was performed by young people at the Culture Cares Conference 2021.

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Group A is a vocal performance initiative for young people in Suffolk run by Britten Pears Arts. Working with 8-18-year-olds in Suffolk, Group A consists of vocal performance groups that rehearse and perform throughout the year. The project gives young people opportunities to work with a wide variety of professional musicians and artists, explore a breadth of musical genres and take part in exciting and creative performances, locally and nationally. The work aims to help build positive community links and raise aspirations for young people.

Group A have co-written the finale song for this year’s Celebration (the annual festival for schools and young people). They worked with composer Emily Barden in October half-term last year to give their thoughts on what the piece should be about, as well as helping to write the melody. They had some really frank discussions about how they felt about the world since covid and how they want to be recognised for who they are. In this video you will get to hear about the writing process and hear some of the song itself.

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Shout Out for the Arts is led by a youth board who campaign for engagement and diversity in the arts, they are currently working on diversifying the board so that it includes young people from across a large rural county. Hear from Saanvi who has been involved since she was 10 years old about her experience working with WCEP and Shout Out for the Arts.

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Sophiya Sian – An Animation

This project, and the further opportunities it brought, fuelled Sophiya’s enthusiasm for the creative approach to journalism she would like to take further. The ‘How Are We’ Zine is an illustrated collection of the thoughts, anecdotes and voices of young people interviewed during the first 2020 lockdown. The Mighty Creatives provided an opportunity to find and curate the answers to questions unasked, and explore what it really felt like to be young during this sudden global pause.

Here’s the link to the Zine: https://www.thinkinfin.com/how-are-you-zine-02

Freya Stephens-Dunn – A Song

Freya Rose is a teenager living near Stamford, Lincolnshire.  She has always loved music and singing from a young age and in the last few years started to write her own songs. For this commission Freya was given a brief of ‘finding your voice’ and wanted to create something that would represent friendship and how young people grow. The short song ‘Be Free’ is something that should make people think about who they surround themselves with and what thoughts they let control them. The lyric ‘I’ll throw a rope to you’ can represent the great friendships we form in our lives or could just be us allowing ourselves to find our voice.

Fatma Mohiuddin – A Poem

Fatma Mohiuddin was the 2021 Birmingham Young Poet Laureate. Fatma enjoys writing about a wide range of topics, and particularly focusing on spoken word poetry and using performance as a tool to enhance her poems. Fatma’s poems challenge stereotypes in society and help break down the stigma surrounding many topics such as equality and mental health. Fatma believes that many young people are held back by themselves and their own self-doubt, so hopes that her poetry and performances will be able to help them gain confidence and eventually start sharing their own work for people to see. 

Twitter: @MohiuddinFatma Instagram: @fatma_mohiuddin


Colour the future

Imagine a world starved of colour.
Imagine a world so painfully perfect, that the beauty just fades away.
A world where black bleeds into white, and white into black,
But really it’s just an eternity of grey.
No one to hold us, to love or to care
An empty void where there’s no one there,
And watch the life slowly fade,
But somehow the suffering still remains.
But. that. can’t. happen.
That. Won’t. Happen.
Because as they say
“There’s a reason we don’t see the world in black and white”**
A reason why shadows disappear when we shine a light
And that light is the people who keep us alive.
Because it’s the times that we’re together,
That’s worth the fight.
When we paint on distant dreams,
Dreams that we colour into our own reality.
Because the most beautiful moments,
Are the ones when we stand as one,
When it’s not the shade that matters,
But the light that pierces the darkness,
The fire that ignites when we come together.
Sketching our own imperfectly picture perfect world.
Because we are not only the present,
But the future too.
And nothing is ever impossible
When we have the right people around,
To make ushappier.
The right people,
To make usstronger.
And sometimes that’s all we need;
The right people.
To bring the world, just that little bit more
Colour.  

** original quote by Celerie Kemble