Your are in: Home / News / Adding the finishing touches – DIY’s 30th Celebrations

Adding the finishing touches – DIY’s 30th Celebrations

Everybody at DIY is getting very excited about hosting our birthday events in June.

We are just adding the finishing touches!

All our birthday projects are all in their very final stages, we are just adding the finishing touches!

We think everything is looking great so we are looking forward to sharing the finished works at our Celebration Events on 18^th and 21^st June.

The Close Knit project is really taking shape.

Textiles is a great way to work with lots of different people including people who are non-verbal and to communicate with people who are non-verbal”
DIY Artist

The Core Company had a really great session with Lead Artist Claire Hignett in May.

Claire shared all the different textile pieces made for the project; the colourful pennants from our Visual Arts group and the work DIY’s Core Company has created about the history of our shows. We then went on to look at options for how all these elements could be combined and discussed how the piece should look and be used.

DIY’s film-maker Hilary Easter-Jones also attended the session to capture the creative process. This film will be part of the programme at our Close Knit Event, 21^st June at the Angel Centre.

This event is now in the past, thank you if you came to help us celebrate, we had a great time.

We want people to see our creative work and the way we use drama and textiles. Everyone with a learning disability has a voice!”
DIY Artist

Our new film will be launched at our Celebration on 18^th June

Our “Exploring Our Past, Shaping our Futures” film is at the final edit. We are very much looking forward to sharing it as part of the programme at our 1st Birthday Celebration event.

The film profiles lots of the different elements of DIY’s work including performances, leadership, cultural education and advocacy. We can’t possibly include all the amazing people that have been involved in DIY over the years and all the work we’ve been doing but hopefully the audience will get a flavour of who we are and the difference that we make.

Watch the trailer now:

Trailer – Exploring Our Past; Shaping Our Futures – Celebrating 30 Years of DIY Theatre Company through film from DIY Theatre Company on Vimeo.

DIY Core Company held a lovely planning session for the film event with Hilary Easter Jones during May. Hilary has been working with DIY for many years and she has helped us to build up a brilliant film archive. There are too many to show at our birthday event, so we had to choose. To do this we held a film-screening, and looked through our archive. We included a series of Pearl and Dean retro cinema adverts and ate lots of popcorn!

After watching a selection of films the Core Company had a very good discussion about which films to show and why.

Here’s a list of the films we selected and why we thought it was important to include them in our event on Tuesday 18^th June:

Exploring LEX Leadership

Some people don’t think that people with learning disabilities can be leaders. They look up to people in the media and think just those people are leaders.”

Following Patient 36 Process

It was so powerful – how can someone put disabled people into an institution when they’d done nothing wrong? It’s so unfair. It’s absolutely horrible”.

Give Digital a Go!

It proves people with learning disabilities can use Zoom. It proves people with learning disabilities can use technology”

I Wish Everything was Back to Normal

It makes us remember what was happening during lockdown”

It’s about lockdown and it shows how we didn’t stop and we carried on. A lot of other groups stopped. If we’d stopped we would have got bored. We had to find a way of carrying on.”

Have you booked your place to join DIY, watch some of our films and much, much more!!

This event is now in the past, thank you if you came to help us celebrate, we had a great time.

Our 30^th birthday really has offered us a great opportunity to look back on DIY’s history and think about all the things we’ve done over the years. We only hope that other people will enjoy watching our films as much as we have!

I love memorising all the hard work we’ve done”

I loved looking back at the shows and watching all the shows we’ve done in the past and in the present”