Peter Daldorph - Wildhead's creator

 

A central theme of my creative practice has been to try to overcome the barriers that prevent people from different backgrounds engaging with the arts.

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This belief led me to set up and chair an organisation called Write-On - www.writeon.org.uk - that continues to create opportunities for new writers, actors and directors in Eastern England and more widely. The philosophy was to allow everyone who wants to share their work to see it performed by local actors.

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Recently, I was one of the lead creatives in two successful community National Heritage Lottery Fund projects - Origins, about the history Scottish Prisoners of War and the drainage of the Fens, and The Adventurers - a new exploration of the archives, a translation of archival research into range of shared outputs. These projects created books, performances, audio plays and film and grew new audiences in the Fens.

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I also received Arts Council funding through their Develop Your Creative Practice (2021) to explore new forms of storytelling. The project aimed to take stories from the local community in Cambridgeshire and bring them to life through film and sound; focusing in the end on the work of the Victorian poet, James Reynolds Withers and well as re-imagining the traditional story, The Dead Moon.

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My creative practice focused for a long time on theatre, as a writer, director and producer; performances in local theatres, including The Junction in Cambridge and at festivals such as the Camden Fringe. Lately, I have concentrated on historical archives and bringing the stories contained in them to life through theatre, storytelling, written prose, poetry and film, as well as my own storytelling, working on a number of projects including the King of the Birds, a story told for adults and children explored through theatre and film, a play about the poet John Clare and a book of stories based on a re-imagining of traditional stories. For several years, I have been working on a book about the lost lakes of the Fens.

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I am also an environmentalist and scientist and always seek to bring this part of my life into my art. 

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These experiences in delivering projects and engaging with people and communities has made me appreciate how life enhancing creative work of this kind can be.  

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Many of my recent work have focused on the Fens and I plan to continue this.