Our patient participation programmes provide year round opportunities for patients to engage with the arts. Developing creative, interactive projects in the hospital setting, we work with external partners such as Chisenhale Gallery, Spitalfields Festival, London Symphony Orchestra and Polka Children's Theatre.
These projects take the form of workshops and artists' residencies. We design initiatives that give patients the opportunity to learn new skills through stimulating and often unexpected processes of art, music and performance.
London Symphony Orchestra - Film score rewrites
Vital Arts and long term partner the London Symphony Orchestra, are developing an exciting new film project this year. Young patients are rewriting soundtracks for films in the orchestras repertoire. Patients will direct, conduct and record LSO musicians to create new tracks and sound effects on music software Garageband.
World Music Workshops
Musicians from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) demonstrate the charm of the Mbira and the Kora to patients in the hospital schoolrooms.
You're The Boss
Following on from last year's programme with the Chisenhale Gallery, artists-in-residence Yara El-Sherbini and Simon Woolham working with young patients to create collaborative games, activities and tournaments for the school holidays. Parents, carers and siblings are all invited to join in!
Drama workshops
POLKA Children's Theatre return to the Royal London, touring children's wards in a series of workshops on creative play, story telling, role play and interactive performance.
JUNK Music workshops
Jim Cartwright, Carly Lake and Ron McElroy are working with young patients, developing listening, memory and co-ordination skills through learning rhythmical patterns and drum techniques on junk instruments.
Firefly Spitalfields Festival
Vital Arts and Spitalfields have a long and successful history of working together. In 2010 musicians from folk-jazz five-piece Firefly will begin three exciting projects.
Lullabies
Mothers, along with new born babies and their families are singing, sharing and writing new lullabies from around the world in weekly singing workshops on the Royal London's labour wards. Patients are contributing to a song bank of lullabies from Somalia, Turkey, Bangladesh, England, Poland and beyond! At the end of this project, the collected works will be produced on a CD to be distributed to all participants.
Xenakis Animation
As part of a collaboration with local schools, young patients with Cystic Fibrosis will interpret Xenakis' Pleiades (a sextet for percussion) by recording urban sounds capes from around the hospital. Recordings will be used as a soundtrack for animation created by schools in Tower Hamlets with digital artists igloo. The final piece will be projected at Spitalfields Festival Summer 2010.
New Music Commission
Firefly have been commissioned to create a series of recordings for the Nuclear Medicine's PET centre at Barts. Works will be inspired by improvisation workshops run in collaboration with Barts and The London Orchestra and Choir.
Interactive Music Workshops
Cellist Sam Glazer and flautist Claire Bloor perform interactive workshops on the specialist Geriatric and Stroke Units at the Royal London Hospital.
Cellist Sam Glazer and flautist Claire Bloor perform interactive workshops on the specialist Geriatric and Stroke Units at the Royal London Hospital.