Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Kids’ Guernica at Bedales Prep School in UK



Performance Video
March 18, 2018
At the beginning of February, 2018, Bedales Prep School, Dunhurst, a small independent Prep school in the South East of England, enjoyed a week of cross-curricular workshops in response to the ‘Kids’ Guernica’ project. We began with a whole school assembly dedicated to Picasso’s famous painting, ‘Guernica’, 1937, and showed our pupils the Kids’ Guernica project, the response of school children around the world. Across all subjects we discussed international peace and explored four main themes; Young and Old, Friendship, Love and Conflict. In Art and Design, pupils began to compose the mural. There are five main panels (left to right); Conflict, Young and Old, Friendship, Love and Peace Poetry. We used textile collage and stitch and were inspired by the work of contemporary British artist, Grayson Perry. All pupils in years 7 and 8 (ages 11-14) studied and were inspired to write poetry in English, they then added their words in stitch to the mural. In History, pupils learnt about the rise of Nazism in Germany in the inter-war period. In French, pupils read and illustrated the poetry of Paul Eluard, notably his poems Liberté and ‘La victoire de Guernica’. Finally over the course of two days pupils explored the four main themes again, in Dance, Drama and Music to create a performance that was played against the backdrop of our stitched mural.