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Creating Community Through Circus: A Q&A with Cath from In Your Space Circus

30.12.24 By Beth-Louise Sturdee

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The Ideas Fund is proud to support In Your Space Circus, a circus school and performance company based in Derry, Northern Ireland, that is supporting older people to have fun, develop new skills and build community through circus. We spoke to Company Director Cath about their work and their experience of The Ideas Fund so far.

The Ideas Fund is proud to support In Your Space Circus, a circus school and performance company based in Derry, Northern Ireland, that is supporting older people to have fun, develop new skills and build community through circus. We spoke to Company Director Cath about their work and their experience of The Ideas Fund so far.

Can you tell us a bit about In Your Space and your work with older people?

We’re a circus school and performance company, and we work with people from all ages – from toddlers right up to adults. We’d wanted to work with older people for quite a while when the opportunity with The Ideas Fund came up. So that’s what we’ve done. With support from The Ideas Fund, we’ve been running a project that teaches circus skills to older people. It’s a space where people can come together and build community, whilst doing something different and joyful. We’ve taught traditional circus skills like juggling and trapeze. But also brain gym games as well, that are designed to address issues like early onset dementia. We partnered with a researcher, Dr Nick McCaffrey, as part of this project, to deepen our understanding about the impacts that teaching circus skills to older people can have.

How have you found collaborating with a researcher?

It’s been lovely. It’s really helped us to understand what’s happening in the room on a much deeper level. We were matched with Nick, who happens to be a social researcher and a circus trainer! We were so lucky to get him – he’s probably the only person locally with that skill set. But that has been invaluable because he understands circus. We didn’t have to do any of the groundwork in terms of bringing him up to speed about what we do and how we do it. He hit the ground running and was fully immersed and involved from day one.

Nick joins in with the sessions and observes, and has also carried out interviews with the participants and tutors. Because he’s around a lot, our participants are very comfortable with him.

How has your experience been being part of The Ideas Fund?

The Ideas Fund is a fantastic funder. They have been very supportive, flexible and responsive to change. They also run Community of Practice events where everyone comes together to share information and chat about their projects which has been really useful. The relationship with The Ideas Fund feels more like a partnership than it does with other funders. You’re never scared to say, ‘this isn’t working’, or ‘we want to change that’ or ‘we’re thinking about this new thing’. Sometimes with funders organisations are nervous to go outside the parameters, but with The Ideas Fund, it’s fine. In fact, they encourage it.

What do you have planned coming up with your project?

We have lots of things coming up. We’re hoping to produce a visually engaging one-pager that we can send out to doctors surgeries, government departments and other key stakeholders, that breaks down the research findings in a digestible way and helps people to understand the benefits of circus skills for older people.

We are holding a screening of a film about the project for participants and the general public. This will showcase the project successes and outline the research findings.

We’re also embarking on a significant capital project to turn a heritage building into a circus school and arts venue, so that’s taking a lot of focus right now. But once we have the building it will be amazing for our work. We don’t currently run all our activities from one place, so being able to do that will help us consolidate and bring everything together.

We’re also exploring the possibility of working with Queen’s University in Belfast on their research programme that looks into different ways to support older people.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future with this project?

I think The Ideas Fund gave us the opportunity to reach out and develop deeper relationships with different groups in our community and now they don’t want us to leave! So we want to keep going and reach out to more groups, particularly in more rural and disadvantaged areas. We just need funding to ensure we can keep it all running.

We also just want people to gain a better understanding of circus. People think it’s still touring circuses with animals and they don’t realise that we’re doing instrumental work with all kinds of people. We want to bring the joy of circus to as many people as we can.

A big thank you to Cath for talking to us. If you want to find out more about In Your Space Circus visit: www.inyourspaceni.org