Jake Ryan was one of the first Community Arts applicants who walked through the doors at Blackburn House all those years ago. Unfortunately he won’t be able to attend much of the community arts reunion as he will be performing at Theatre Porto’s annual arts extravaganza ‘Topsy Turvy’ that weekend. This is his character from The Great Porto Horsey Jump-off: a performance he devised with Theatre Porto (ex-Action Transport) where he was employed as their Community Artist; initially for eight months post-pandemic, but it turned into three years. He lives in Wales now and is involved in a variety of projects as an arts educator, community filmmaker and performer, for Arts Council Wales, As Creatives, People First Merseyside and other charities, and is currently working with the Welsh band 9Bach, creating sound responsive animations for their performances and documenting their current tour.
The jump off is essentially a hobby-horse show-jumping course where participants get to make their own horse by adding velcro eyes, manes, ears etc and race them around a little show-jumping course whilst he commentates. They performed it last year and are planning to tour it around events and festivals next year once they’d developed it a bit further: but they’re bringing it back for this years ‘Topsy Turvy’ which you can see here.
Topsy Turvy is Theatre Porto’s annual arts extravaganza where they fill Whitby Park and the new theatre space in Whitby Hall in Ellesmere Port with a variety of work from young-people’s theatre companies and other community arts activities/events: here’s last year’s trailer. It’s a 45 minute train from Liverpool and a 15 min walk from the station – so will be worth a visit if you get the time!