Case Study - NBT

“Northern Ballet Theatre has had a long-standing relationship with Audiences Yorkshire and has worked with them on a number of projects over that time. One key project has been Maximise, an Arts Council funded initiative that Audiences Yorkshire delivered in the region.

The aim of Maximise was to ‘develop work for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) artists and audiences in the main stream’. NBT joined Maximise with the intention to fuse the exploration of ‘diverse programming’ with the existing wish to develop an original story for a new ballet. NBT proposed to create a platform for exchange and collaboration between Artistic Director David Nixon and artists from BME backgrounds.

This was delivered through two creative writing labs in Autumn 2006 and Spring 2007, which interrogated creative processes, identified shared themes and tested collaborative approaches. It was an opportunity to exchange ideas, try out different ways of working and explore the ways in which stories are created.

Theatre visits supported the exchange of ideas and gave the writers a deeper understanding of ballet as an artform. NBT staff attended Yorkshire Mixture, a series of discussions and workshops around BME work and audiences delivered by Audiences Yorkshire, which widened our knowledge and enhanced our understanding to inform future work. The project is ongoing and we hope there will be a piece created that can be shown in NBT’s new building which opens in 2010 in Leeds.

This was a fantastic opportunity for NBT to take a step outside its normal working environment and we were supported in this by Audiences Yorkshire.”

Amy Dutton Head of Marketing Northern Ballet Theatre