Take Art offers support, resources and opportunities to Somerset-based theatre-makers, performance poets, practitioners, companies, venues and programmers.

Including:

Support and advice for making, producing, programming and promoting work;
Advice, signposting, networking and brokering partnerships;
Opportunities for professional development through workshops and skillshares;
Originating ideas and developing new ways of working;
Extending regional, national and international links to bring high-quality work into Somerset.

We enjoy good relationships with Somerset’s Arts venues and are partners in several regional, and national, initiatives including Theatre South West and Venues South West.

Current Projects

Cultivate

Facilitated by Take Art, CULTIVATE is a creative partnership that brings local food, arts and people together for the benefit of rural communities and the natural environment in South Somerset. This work is delivered through a programme of high-quality projects, performances, events and workshops that reconnect people to the local food story, from farm to fork to festival.

Word/Play

Word/Play is a social prescribing project for people experiencing mental ill health or facing other health inequalities. It uses performance poetry to empower individuals, giving them the freedom and encouragement to tell their stories.

Lost Child Project Somerset

The Lost Child Project has been delivered by the David Glass Ensemble with significant impact in several countries around the world since 1997. We are now exploring the potential for a project in Somerset. So far we’ve worked with David Glass to deliver two training programmes in the Lost Child Methodology as the next step towards making this happen.

Previous Projects

BARN

BARN was a collective theatre initiative, facilitated by Take Art, that supported Somerset’s emergent theatre-making sector to develop, test and showcase new work in a predominantly rural context. Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation over six years, it was inspired by the North American rural tradition of barn-raising: in our case, the collective action of a theatre-making sector to build and sustain Somerset’s theatre infrastructure.

RIOTE3

Between October 2020 and September 2022, Take Art was one of eight partners in the Erasmus+ funded programme RIOTE3 that built on the success of RIOTE 2 with its focus on rural and outdoor performance.

Through working together, one of our main aims was to develop material for two innovative books: The Myth behind the Community and The 9th Sense.

In October 2021 we co-produced Journey Exchange, an intergenerational, international project that brought together local people from Burnham and Highbridge, Somerset theatre-makers and artists from Hungary, Germany and Romania.

Theatre-Makers & Performance Poets