Emerald Ant is delighted to announce major funding of £99,918 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a new Dorset arts project, ‘Bubbles and Squeaks’, engaging communities with the plight facing our beautiful rivers and rare chalk streams.
Dorset Council, Dorset National Landscape, Dorchester Town Council and the Fine Family Foundation have also provided funding to collectively support this educational and environmentally significant project.
Emerald Ant will be working alongside environmental partners Dorset Wildlife Trust and their ‘Water for Wildlife’ campaign, and will connect a group of West Dorset and Dorchester schools with the crucial but fragile ecology of their local rivers, as they learn about and celebrate their unique biodiversity through creative arts and performance.
Working with the local community, stories around the rivers Cerne, Hooke, Frome and Mangerton Brooke will be brought to life, following on from ecologist-led school visits to the rivers, allowing children to witness and help understand the threats facing these precious waterways first hand.
Schools will work with artists to create a choreographed, musical body of river creatures to be paraded at processional events later this year. On September 26th, there will be a colourful summer procession in Cerne Abbas, and on 17th October in Powerstock, an illuminated lantern event bringing in the winter, culminating in a fire sculpture. Kingfishers, heron, mayfly and crowfoot, trout and salmon, and coming up at the back, a ‘March of the Beavers’, will bear placards encouraging action to protect their collective homes. All are welcome to these free events.
Family arts workshops will take place in central and west Dorset this summer. Watch out for posters or follow Emerald Ant on social media. Emerald Ant is well-known for its work across Dorset, with the Glow Badbury event in 2023 at Badbury Rings.
Sarah Butterworth, Emerald Ant’s Creative Director, said: ‘We are proud of the work being done for rivers by our environmental partners, and this project will help spread the word, encourage community discussion and fundamentally be a catalyst for action on a local scale. Thank you to lottery players for supporting this valuable work.’
