For three years an exciting partnership existed between Unicorn Theatre and Barclays Soho Square Media Centre.

Each year a group of volunteer staff from Barclays were offered the opportunity to work with storyteller and Unicorn Education Associate Susanna Steele to put together a storytelling project linked to a Unicorn Theatre production, with a local school (Clement Dane’s C of E Primary School, Westminster). 

The project was designed to benefit both the volunteers and the pupils from the school. Not only were the volunteers given the chance to gain valuable skills in storytelling but they also gained an insight into how primary schools work and were able to contribute in a creative way to the education of young children in the inner city.

For the children, the project was an opportunity to become familiar with the storyline prior to seeing the production and to broaden and enrich their experience of working with adults, other then their teachers, in an educational setting. 

Beginning with workshop sessions where storytelling skills were explored, the volunteers moved on to observing Susanna storytelling in a class environment, talking to small groups of children about stories and working with them on a story-linked activity before finally telling their stories to a small group of children.

In 2002 and 2003 an additional artist was brought on board to contribute skills that would complement the sessions in keeping with the show, for example in 2003 percussionist Saul Eisenburg joined the group to create a musical backdrop to the individual storytelling sessions of Rumplestilkskin.
 
Each project was completed with the storytellers accompanying the class to the Unicorn production around which their stories had been based.

This project was funded by Barclays PLC