CONNECTING WITH CREATIVITY

Hello from all of us at Wintercroft. We hope you and your family are healthy and safe. We're excited to share the first part of our experimental online play we’re making with our family and builder community. You might have seen our posts about a “Wizard of Oz” retelling and we’re proud to present the first four scenes premiering tomorrow. As you will see, they’re improvisational, zany and hilarious. It's been great fun to collaborate and work together with families during these strange times.

The challenges of living in isolation are numerous and varied for everyone’s individual circumstances, but though we can feel disconnected physically with those outside our home, digitally, we’re more connected than ever. This current situation got us thinking about how we could help people make the most of this unprecedented situation. We wanted to help isolated families just like ours get together and make things with whatever we have around, using the limited resources available while shielding. Here’s how it came about.

One of the most magical parts of working at Wintercroft is seeing how kids and teachers from all different cultures around the world build and decorate our masks to make a theatrical play come to life. In the onset of global social restrictions, we’ve seen beautifully detailed masks and productions that were all ready to go put on hold. It's really sad to see all this hard work shelved indefinitely, so we decided that an online production of the classic Wizard of Oz play could be a whole lot of fun to do together. This way, we can tell a story collectively and connections can be made remotely by taking advantage of the technology that most folks have on-hand. The results have a free-form feel to them, which makes for a fun playful performance.

We are so grateful to the folks who made the masks and videos that went into this project. It starts with families building together and using their imaginations to make a classic story come to life. Most of us already have the technology we need to stay connected, which enables projects involving collective storytelling and creative collaboration to go ahead, even during a time of physical shielding. Part One premiers on our Facebook Page on 15/05/2020 at 1pm BST, so join us on our quest to see the Wizard by clicking the button below.