On April 30th Lead Researchers Mike and Chris went to meet a lady names Angela and her mother Phyllis who had responded to a piece in the Congleton Chronicle about our project. Phyllis lives on a farm in Swettenham, a small village on the outskirts of Congleton that is mentioned alongside the larger town in the 'Other' section  of our Helm text.
Phyllis's father was a performer of the local Soul Play and a recording was made of him in 1953/4 singing and playing one of the key songs from the play by Peter Kennedy, an important figure in the history of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
The Swettenham play, as recorded in part on this piece of archive footage features several characters that are different to the core text of the Antrobus play on which most seem to be based, meaning that here, we have found some original information that is not actually recorded in the Helm text!

Mike and Chris will be heading back to Swettenham in a few weeks to speak again with Phyllis and take some photographs of some of the items that she still has from her father's collection.

On Saturday the 22nd April Project Manager Steph and Research Lead Chris headed off to Bunbury Mill to meet some of the amazing volunteer team who maintain the mill and open it up to visitors every week. The mill has a great programme of events from general opening on Sundays through to an active schools programme that sees children from across Cheshire visit the impressive working mill and it's beautifual surroundings.
We are thrilled that the Mill are a big part of the Souling project and will be hosting one of our performance events in the Autumn.
We will be working with groups of young people in the village of Bunbury to conduct local research, write a brand new song with Songwriter Virginia Kettle and stage the Bunbury play as an exciting promenade piece of theatre taking over the grounds of the Mill.

The final performance will happen on Saturday the 28th October with two performances, one at 11.30 and the other at 2.30pm. The performances will be free but donations to help support the Mill's continuing work will be greatly appreciated. Refreshments including Soul Cakes made to a traditional recipe will also be provided.

Big thanks to Virginia Kettle, our 'hands on the ground' who has brokered these relationships and helped get things up and running in Bunbury.

We can't wait!

We are thrilled to be able to announce that as part of the outreach we are conducting for the Souling project we will be sharing work at the Rustic Music and Arts Festival this coming July.
The Rustic Festival is a community spirited and run event with a national reach, bringing high quality folk, acoustic and roots music to Northwich every year alongside loads of activities for children and families.
We will be brining a very special workshop to the festival where children and young people will have the chance to explore and perform the plays themselves, create new performances, write songs and even collaborate on a brand new musical commission that we are creating!
We are really excited about bringing the project to this event. If you would like to find out more about the festival you can do so here.

Steph paid another visit to BBC Radio Merseyside's Folkscene programme last month to record an update on the project and pick some tracks to play on the air too.
Being able to talk on the radio about the project offers a great opportunity not only to talk about what we are doing here at Minerva but also to get more people 'in the know' about Souling, after all, that is one of the key aims of the project!
The show is pre-recorded and our edition went out on the 2nd April, the link to listen again on the BBC iPlayer can be found here...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001d79l
 

On the 8th March, Steph and Mike from the project team visted Congleton History Society to talk about the project, share some initial research and ask the society for any help that they might be able to provide. We got a great response with lots of questions and many members not having heard of the plays previously. We have now sent out a call in their regular newsletter to ask for members to contribute their own stories related to the plays and interesting anecdotes about the town as well as asking for members to volunteer some of their time to help us with the research process specific to the Congleton and Astbury areas.

We were rerally excited and pleased to see the response from the society and canot wait to get started with the work in Congleton. In the next month we will hold an open session in Congleton library to pull some stories together and bring the members of the society together with the research team. 

Today we are pleased to announce our first delivery partner on the project, Astbury St. Mary's Church of England School. The school is a beautiful traditional and petite school set in the heart of the village of Astbury and we are thrilled that they have come on board for the project.
We are in the process of finalising the shape in which our delivery will take and the timeline into which it will fit but we will be working with Year 4 and 5 children as our research group and then engaging the many creative groups that they have at school, including drama club, musicians and the choir to develop the new material and stage the play itself.
As a Chruch school, Astbury celebrates All Saints Day with a celebration of light, serving as a contrast to the darker aspects of more well known celebrations of Halloween. This means that our Astbury play will reflect this and be developed alongside the children to bring light, humour and joy to a dark time of the year.
We can't wait to get started!!

The 'Souling' project takes as its inspiration the traditional Souling plays that were performed throughout Cheshire. Several of these plays have continued to be performed in areas such as the fanouns Antrobus, Warburton and Halton to name a few, but many have faded away as time has passed.

This project was developed after the discovery of a monograph left in the archive of Folk Music Historian and writer Fred McCormick after his death in 2016. This archive was left to Dr Mike Brocken, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Liverpool Hope University, Trustee of Minerva Arts and presenter of BBC Radio Merseyside's Folkscene programme. This monograph contained original scripts, a full list of towns and villages who took part in the tradition and a detailed list of changes, individual traditions and quirky tales related to each place.

Our project has been funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund as well as several local councils and will see us undertaking the following activity...

RESEARCH: We have a research team who are currently working on finding out as much information about the plays as possible. We will also be recruiting a team of researchers in each location to help with this research, develop skills in oral history and working with archives and undertake further research to discover interesting and quirky stories from each location.

CREATIVE: We will be working with a team of musicians and writers who will come and work with groups in each location to create brand new songs, poems or short scenes that are inspired by the Souling tradition but feature content that is unique to the location itself.

PERFORMANCE: We will then bring together our new material with the original play and create a performance to be shared publicly in each location.

SHARING: Each play including the new material that is generated will then be written up into a publication that will be published at the end of the year. This publication will be given to each participant and housed at local libraries and archives.

This is a project that we hope will bring this tradition to more people's attention, enable local people to learn skills and have a lot of fun in the process and we can't wait to get started!