Over recent weeks, Orchestras Live teamed up with Bolsover District Council and Music in The Round to deliver a project with a focus on community placemaking through orchestral engagement. Our Midlands Regional Producer, Sooree, talks about how the project engages a very specific feature of Doe Lea, an ex-mining village in the district of Bolsover, Derbyshire.

dancing flowers of doe lea
the land marked by the curved line of coal,
out of the flowers springs the name,
doe lea is a community and place once again

This is the poem to be found on Tonkin Liu’s website alongside images of their “Dancing Flowers of Doe Lea” RIBA East Midlands award-winning sculpture (2019).

The work itself is made of curved metal tubes which weave in and out of each other, set in a bed of wild flowers at the entrance to the village of the same name – and as one reaches a certain angle, this squiggly line comes into focus and spells “Doe Lea”.

It is this setting and sculpture that inspired Daniel Oakley, Community Arts Development Officer at Bolsover District Council, to approach Orchestras Live. Together the two organisations brought Bramley Vale Primary school and the Doe Lea Centre together with music leader Duncan Chapman, Music in The Round and artist Martyn Stonehouse. For a number of days, this small ex-mining village was a hive of musical activity. The purpose? – the sculptors articulated a possible one in the first iteration of the project:

"By using the structure to assert the phonetically and typographically beautiful name, the sign structure also seeks to find a voice for a community with a lost identity."

This time it was the turn of the young community voice to be unearthed. As arts organisations and creatives, the term “community” is used often and in myriad contexts, with as many meanings. What is community then, and why is it important? Is it where we live, who we know and who knows us? Or perhaps the knowledge we share, our common beliefs? I would not be so bold as to suggest that the answer to these questions could be found within the bounds of this short reflection, but this project brings such thoughts to my mind. Somewhere in all of these is the notion of connection, and begs the need for us to explore the function of art and culture within this context.

For Daniel, Doe Lea is a place "developed to support work in one type of industry and as the world and the economy have changed over the years these communities have had to find new identities and reasons to exist. [...] Facing this type of challenge has led to an innate sense of creativity in communities. A ‘make do and mend’ mentality that has seen lots of growth in grass roots arts and culture over the years.”

In this way, one may argue that the purpose of a collective of artists here is to harness that innate sense of creativity, rather than to impose a pre-defined notion of what creativity is.

Pupils at the school worked with the musicians, recording their creative responses to the sculpture, making new sounds to articulate and manifest in the form of musical co-composition, not only to make a performance, but to play, to be in a social space where the new and the familiar co-exist. This suggests a moment in time, but also the making of a memory, one to be shared. For Daniel, the benefit of the arts is found in the process:

And so, the creative process must surely then find a home - we come back to connection, where this all happens – the place. Certainly places to meet and shared experiences are crucial parts of this.

As I turn into the village on the day of the performance, passing the impressive sculpture on my way, I get a sense of intimacy. The Doe Lea Centre, host of the final performance, is at the heart of this place. As parents, parish councillors, siblings and other invited guests file in, there is excitement in the air – then harnessed by Duncan and the other musicians. A little chat with a lady who had forgotten her glasses and the pre-show fruit squash and cake for the queue of young performers at reception, it all contributes to the newness of the experience combined with the familiarity of the place.

The show is joyous. Repertoire interspersed with new compositions performed by the whole ensemble - Music in The Round surrounded by young creatives. I note the increasingly animated responses to the music across the audience, but in particular by the Bramley Vale Primary performers. And so when the French horn player, Naomi, suggests we all take part in the music performance, I don’t mind clapping a little out of time, or humming along a little out of tune – because in this moment, at this time, and with these people, I feel a part of it.

With arts provision so imbalanced in our society, and Bolsover as a district suffers from less investment in this area proportionally to the rest of the UK, don’t we all have the right to places, spaces and experiences which help us to feel included? Daniel is firmly committed to facilitating more experiences such as these in the areas where he works:

The next place we will see the Dancing Flowers will be an interactive online resource, made from content created during the sessions at the school, a work artfully mastered by Martyn Stonehouse. And so from the squiggly line we draw a path – to colour, form and sounds that all become the creativity of Doe Lea.