The Story of The En-Form
En-form is a registered environmental charity dedicated to helping make a difference one bit at a time. From recycling plastic to reduce carbon impacts to best practice and advise with making homes more energy efficient to reduce your fuel bills – the organisation is there to help.
En-form operates a range of environmental projects including the Colchester Eco-festival which is run by a committee of volunteers, many of whom are independent event professionals (Malcolm Laquis-Alden, Martin Reed, Clare Swann).
En-Form aims to encourage public involvement in safeguarding and improving the environment with the objective of contributing towards the establishment of a healthy and sustainable environment in which all communities can thrive, fulfilling the following functions:
- Provide comprehensive information on a wide range of environmental issues.
- Assist individuals and organisations to make better-informed decisions on how they can help improve and sustain our environment.
- Act as a focal point for all local environmental groups.
- Help all the local groups to achieve their environmental projects by building partnerships with like-minded groups, helping with funding advice, and providing more general advice.
- Inform & educate the local population on environmental matters by offering a link between schools and other local groups and environmental education services
- Inspire other groups to start and achieve a range of environmental projects, acting as a catalyst and partner.
Key Staff
Martin Reed is a performance storyteller, street-theatre performer, immersive actor, and event organiser. He writes most of his own material and has been involved in writing, performance, and event organisation since around 2006.
Malcolm Laquis-Alden is a professional event manager, having been employed as such by the University of Essex for some years. Malcolm is responsible for the legal, safety, security, and infrastructural elements of arts delivery at the festival. Malcolm started Colchester Eco-festival.
Andrew Wilkinson is currently En-form’s only full-time employee. Andrew pursued a career in banking for many years but retired early and then became one of the founders of En-form, which he describes as a ‘light green’ organisation’ in 1999, and has been its primary ‘mover and shaker’ ever since.
Claire Swann has performed and run workshops at festivals of various kinds (e.g., Illusive Festival, and Strawberry Fair, etc.) since leaving employ at Firstsite. She also runs the performance group, Iloomiloonies who have been involved in many projects in the area.
The “Challenge” or “Opportunity”
There were several challenges and opportunities with the project.
With regards to the ‘Backdrop, Art and Storytelling project’ where the Festival created backdrops for the Children’s Tent at the Eco-Festival with young people, the Festival initially struggled to identify and engage with young people, but through contacts with the Bangladeshi Women’s Group who meet at Firstsite were able to encourage children of the Women’s Group to attend project workshops.
Holding sessions at Firstsite introduced the Festival to the manager of the ‘Young Art Kommunity’ young people’s group. Group manager Beth Hull encouraged members to manage a stall at the eco-festival. Through Firstsite the Festival were also able to work Lora Aziz, a professional visual artist from the Islamic community, who ran the visual arts workshops.
On the day of the festival there were serious traffic issues on the A12 and in and around Colchester due to a number of events taking place on the same day. The fact that the weekend was so busy had both positive and negative effects. There were a great many more people in the city centre than usual contributing to the high attendance at the festival. On the other hand, some artists including, Efua Sey Koi Larbi were delayed causing significant problems in terms of scheduling.
However, when they did arrive, Efua put in extra time, and indeed Efua Sey’s show was featured on ITV. Some future learning has been that we will focus on quality acts that are within easy traveling distance of the site or, alternatively, ones which can be accommodated locally.
Funding
The Children’s Arts for the Earth Project forms part of the Colchester Eco-Festival 2022 and is built on the success of the children’s area at the Colchester Eco-Festival in 2021. The festival itself has a number of environmental themes including biodiversity, waste, and recycling, sustainable transport, water, energy, local food, and consumption.
It is important that it attracts the general public and not just those primarily interested in environmental matters, via the children’s activities but it is also important that once engaged in the arts activities the children and their families are exposed to ideas which can support their understanding of the natural environment. This is particularly important in regard to those that are hard to reach and those struggling with recent cost of living rises.
The art, culture, and family activities such as those taking place in the children’s tent and baby zone together with free admittance ensure that the Festival could attract all members of society.
The children’s area project is particularly focused on the issue that many environmentally-based events/projects are lacking in diversity and inclusivity. What better way to start to redress this than to provide children’s activities which are replete with both these things – inclusivity and diversity – in order to bring families, from all sections of society, together to take part in fun activities themed on environmental concerns?
Arts development-wise this represents both an opportunity and a challenge. Combining the promotion of environmental concerns with diversity and inclusivity in a fun is a challenging ambition. However, all the people involved in the project were enthusiastic, professional, and above all, of course, creative.
Theming all the arts activities towards environmental issues is the brief that all the workshop leaders have to follow. Workshop leaders such as Baden Prince chose his material with environmental issues in mind. Similarly, the storyteller, Efua Sey Koi Larbi, has a vast store of African mythology to choose from, in terms of finding stories that support positive environmental messages.
The Obby’s Osstlers street theatre is based around the idea that the costumed figure, Obby, can answer any question, so with a little development, it can be ensured that the answers to questions lead to a further understanding of environmental ideas.
Clare Sams is an artist with a proven track record in delivering high-quality art/fabric designs that support the effort to be kind to our planet; and Karen Rogers uses environmental concepts in her fun, and musical, Makaton workshop.
Finally, the Arabic calligraphy workshop highlight this beautiful artform. A set of positive messages, culled from Arabic folklore (such as Nasruddin tales) and other sources were represented on flags, along with their English translations.
This effort to harness the power of a set of artistic skills and traditions, so that they can support environmental purposes, is an art development which is necessary at this time of potential crisis in the planet’s history.
What happened once you started working with the community. What was addressed first, and why?
Creating cultural links with the Islamic community in Colchester was a matter of feeling one’s way. Martin Reed attended the Islamic centre a number of times in order to forge these links and spoke with a number of people, over a significant period of time (about four months). However members of the community initially engaged with the project left the UK for varying lengths of time. The Islamic centre is, essentially, the mosque, and their interests are, understandably, religious rather than secular; there are some extra-curricular activities for young people, but these mostly centre around football. So, the Islamic centre became the springboard for the Festival’s involvement with Colchester’s Islamic community, rather than its focus.
When the Festival came to formulating the timetable, venue, and content of the pre-festival workshops, it was the Bangladeshi Women’s Association, based at Firstsite, which was the community organisation with which the Festival primarily worked with.
One issue encountered is that many of the Bangladeshi families went to see family abroad during the summer, so attendance at the workshops was, at first, quite light, and mostly consisted of members of the general public who had come to Firstsite. However, this was rectified later on, and the Bangladeshi families became very enthusiastic about the project.
The Results
The storytelling/art project was a success and achieved all its aims – to produce a backdrop for the eco-festival stage, to introduce groups of children to storytelling, and to create links between the eco-festival & the children & carers of the Islamic community. The numbers of children involved in the artwork were relatively small (about 30) all told, but the links created are strong, such that an extension of the project has been advocated for by the leader of the Bangladeshi women’s group, Salma Ahmed, “[…]It would be nice to have an extension of the activity perhaps weekend or holiday period.” In addition, although it is difficult to come to an exact figure, certainly over 1,000 people saw the backdrop on the day.
Since the eco-festival is free access, and Lower Castle Park has many access routes, estimating how many people attended the various different aspects of the festival is quite difficult.
Overall, 2824 tickets were issues, but attendees do not have to have a ticket to come to the festival, and other indicators point to a much higher attendance.
The Festival had ‘clickers’ monitoring people coming into the park on three of the park entrances for part of the day. These returned a total of 3,500 people entering the park. Since the clickers were not on duty all day, the other two entrances were not monitored, and there were approximately 600 people in the park to start with – as contributors to the festival – we estimate, from experience, that the number of attendees in total was from 4,500 to 5,000 people. The Colchester Gazette reporter separately estimated around 4,500. Certainly, the 2022 festival was a lot busier than the 2021 event, and the latter was estimated to have attracted about 3,500.
The stage/arena area attracts crowds all day – but of different sizes and constituents. Probably the maximum crowd at the 2022 event was around 250 around the stage/arena itself, with large numbers of people also listening from further off. Crowds of around 200 are common when dance groups are on, in particular, because it is necessary for people to actually physically attend the arena in order to experience these, whereas people can listen to the music being played on the stage from a much wider area. Given that there were around 11, very different, acts over the whole day, six of them dance acts, estimating that over 1,000 different people attended the stage area and saw the backdrop is very conservative.
The children’s activities in and around the children’s tent also had a motile audience. People were coming and going all day, and some of the children’s activities were on the periphery of the tent rather than in it. Again, we can say that there were probably around one thousand visits to these activities throughout the day, including those who experienced the walkabout performances.
Efua Sey’s African drumming & dancing workshops were probably the highlight of the activities in the children’s tent (see images). Certainly, ITV thought so and spent some considerable time filming them. Baden Prince’s storytelling performance, as can be seen from the image (below) was well attended – it is particularly difficult to acquire reasonably sized audiences for spoken word, so this was quite an achievement. The Obby’s Osstlers (sic) walkabout performance was presented to a large number of small groups over the whole day. Each time some small element of our current environmental understanding was covered. The visual arts workshops carried out in and around the tent itself were also focused on environmental themes.
