The Lord of the Crane

From the 3rd – 9th August, Richmond Theatre Trust worked in collaboration with Culture 4 Keeps with around 15 young people on an exciting and inspirational participatory project, which culminated in a performance on stage.

Aged between eleven and seventeen, all participants were children looked after in Richmond and surrounding areas.

The project saw the Trust also working alongside Orleans House Gallery and Richmond Library. As Richmond Library were working on their Summer Reading Challenge during the month of August with the theme “Record Breakers”, the project was also focussed around the same theme. Therefore, during the project, we had the aim to set our own world record which will be approved by the Summer Reading Challenge sponsors, The Guinness Book of Records.

The World Record: How did we achieve this?

We worked with participants to present the story “The Lord of the Cranes”. This beautiful Chinese folk tale is based around the premise that cranes are creatures that can share and encourage kindness and generosity. Therefore we presented this story on stage and dressed the stage with hundreds of origami paper cranes, in all different sizes.

As we have now had our deadline to achieve the record extended, we will be continuing to work with local community groups to create cranes until 31 October. Every crane generated will matter and after we reach our target we will collaborate with a group of young adults, as part of an arts therapy project, and create an art installation from cranes we have generated. This is likely to be displayed at Orleans House Gallery.

The world record we will set therefore will be: The biggest number of origami paper birds (used in a theatre production in the world).

Cranes on the net