Stella Barnes

My Story

Freelance Consultant, Facilitator and Participatory Artist

Background

I grew up in the North East of England, a stone’s throw from the River Tyne. We were a family of misfits. My mother was a refugee and my father was a nonconformist maverick. I had an unhappy time at school. I was bullied and I didn’t fit in, I didn’t do very well academically, I failed my 11-plus and was sent to a local secondary modern school. I remember that the children from the grammar school were told not to mix with us and called us names. Even at the age of 11, I was acutely aware of the injustice of selective education.

It’s interesting to me that I didn’t do well at school as I come from a long line of teachers. In the 1920s my great aunt, Tanta Gusti, taught at an orphanage in Vienna and was an early advocate of child-centred learning. My grandmother, a refugee from Czechoslovakia, settled in Britain with her children and taught therapeutic movement to children with additional needs. Both my parents were radical educators and were close associates of drama-in-education pioneer and radical educator Dorothy Heathcote. As a child, I spent many happy school holidays observing Dorothy Heathcote running drama in education workshops and was amazed by the way she engaged participants in role. Her work inspired me to go on to study drama.

In the 1980s I studied for a degree in Drama and Dance at Bretton Hall College, an innovative HE college specialising in the arts and known for radical arts education. At the time I didn’t realise how unique an experience it was. Bretton Hall was an amazing place to learn, to experiment, to collaborate and grow. I left Bretton Hall with the skills to devise theatre from scratch, with a strong understanding of drama in education and a grounding in pedagogy, which I’ve carried with me throughout my life.

GYPT

In the 1990s I joined GYPT (Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre) part of the wider Theatre in Education movement. Here I experienced co-creation and non-hierarchical working practices in a real-world context. Through interrogating the work of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal and others, GYPT gave me a grounding in social pedagogy, radical arts education and Theatre of the Oppressed. Unlike many participatory arts organisations today, artists were at the heart of the company with a permanent, salaried team of actor-teachers leading the work.

At GYPT we interrogated the work with depth and integrity and applied the politics of the time to everything that we did. This was only possible because of having a core team of artists. Everyone had a voice in the work, especially children and young people, and the work we made respected their ability to engage with complex subject matter. Theatre projects responded to real concerns, such as the Balkan war, the rise of hate crimes and racism, the experiences of newly arrived refugees in schools, the impact on children and families of domestic violence.

Ovalhouse

I left GYPT to join Ovalhouse (now Brixton House), in the early 2000s where I led the Participation Department for 13 years. My work was particularly focused on children and young people whose lives were impacted by social justice issues and who experienced structural barriers to arts participation. I set up long-term projects with young refugees including We Are London, a 13-year youth arts programme and The Paper Project, an artist collective of young adults who had experienced forced migration.

The work was at the cutting edge of arts and social justice, working in partnership with community drugs teams, alternative education provision, youth justice, parents of disabled children, corporate parenting and social work teams.

We established a youth leadership programme where young leaders devised their own ethical manifesto and as a team, we committed to holding ourselves accountable to them. Many of the young leaders went on to become arts leaders in their own right and I stay in touch with many of them.

Community Arts North West

In 2019, I became Creative Director of CAN (Community Arts North West), a well-established arts charity in Manchester, where I worked with a creative team to develop and deliver an innovative socially engaged arts programme, with a special focus on arts and migration. One of CAN’s flagship projects, which continues today, is the annual Horizons Festival, delivered in partnership with HOME Manchester. Horizons is a celebration of international cultures, creativity, and contemporary stories of migration in Greater Manchester. The festival has commissioned dozens of artists and has provided a platform for young people and communities to share their creativity. Each year the festival has partnered with a national campaign, such as Lift the Ban, which challenges the ban on people seeking asylum being permitted to work.

Today

As a freelancer, I continue to apply my creative leadership experience and skills to a wide range of projects and contexts: running training; leading research and evaluation projects; supporting organisations and creative teams to engage in new thinking; supporting project development and relationship building. As an artist I continue to co-create with young people and community groups, enabling people on the margins to engage in arts processes and share their creativity.