Soap and glory

Each year QUAD organises a mass participation project intended to encourage communities local to the organisation to become actively involved in the creative process; to experience it, shape it and participate in it. Derby Soap Opera is QUAD’s latest such activity, led by the Italian artist and film maker Marinella Senatore, who has a track record of working with local communities on ambitious film making projects.

In February 2012 QUAD organised two public talk events for Derby Soap Opera, where Senatore introduced the initiative. More than 200 people attended the talks, and hundreds more subsequently took part in a series of 30 ‘skills-based’ workshops throughout February, March and April. The workshops were led by experts, such as Senatore and Oscar nominated film director Ramón Alòs Sánchez, and offered participants the chance to learn the rudiments of skills, such as how to light a film set, how to operate a camera, acting, dancing and script writing.

The overarching ambition of the project is, and continues to be, to involve all 250,000 residents of Derby. To do this effectively QUAD assembled a team consisting of the Artistic Director and Curator to oversee the project, a Project Manager to liaise directly with the Artist and participants, a Volunteer Coordinator to direct the army of local people assisting with various activities, and other members of the programme team in support. Raising awareness of Derby Soap Opera was led by QUAD’s marketing team with a series of articles in the Derby Telegraph and interviews on Radio Derby as well as regional and national coverage. There has been mass circulation of e-flyers and paper flyers, prominent adverts in local newspapers, a poster in the main bus station, and a trailer produced for the project featured on the BBC Big Screen in nearby Market Place. All of these efforts have garnered huge amounts of interest. To date, with an exhibition showcasing the project only recently opened at QUAD and filming of major dance and musical performances for the final film still to come, it is estimated that over 15,000 people have taken part.

The 150-hours of filmed footage will be distilled into a 45-minute film, to be premiered at Derby Festé at the end of September. Alongside the main project is an equally important web-based interactive element, designed by Brendan Randall & Brendan Oliver of Floating Point Digital. This website is intended as a resource for the project, as well as a place for the people of Derby to upload films about themselves, prompted by five questions, including: What is your favourite place in Derby and why? To date more than 350 mini films linked to these questions have been uploaded, many of which have been gathered from visits to such places as Westfield shopping centre, Derby College and a local Sikh Temple. As well as submitting films online, members of the public can contribute material via a specially constructed film booth at QUAD, and an interactive recording station in QUAD’s gallery.

There have been unexpected difficulties with this ambitious project, in the main dictated by what is a continually changing, organic process. From a small, germ of an idea this project has grown to involve everyone in Derby. The interactive website continues to be a portal where people can upload personal films, which feed into and sit alongside the main film work. Members of the Deaf, Sikh, disabled and many other communities have come together to make Derby Soap Opera a reality. No one was excluded, all were invited. Many have taken part.