Mimbre’s Coronavirus Update

06 Apr Mimbre’s Coronavirus Update

From all of us at Mimbre, we hope you are keeping well!

In these fast-changing times we thought we’d email with a quick update about what we’ve been doing in the last couple of weeks, and our plans for the immediate future. In this unusual world we find ourselves in we’ve been doing our best to look after ourselves, our community in Hackney, and our freelance performers and colleagues across the circus and outdoor sectors as best we can. And we hope that what we’ve put together can be of use to others as well. 

Online resources and activities

On our website we have collected some of the resources available online, under four different headings (for now!) This is crowdsourced from all the fantastic material people have been sharing, most of it for free, so we thought we’d gather things that we have come across into one place.
+Physical and Creative Kids’ Activities
+Resources for Youth and their Families
+Resources for Artists and Creatives
+ Resources on Getting Involved in your Community

We will keep updating these posts with new resources as we see them, so do check back in. Please email us too if you have something that could be included.

Mimbre Youth Programme

We moved the last of the spring term classes online and sections from the last couple of classes are now available on our Mimbre Youth YouTube channel. Please take a look if you want to have a go at our acrobatics and dance playlists (please be responsible and only take part in exercises suitable for your fitness level and space!)

We have also gathered together other physical and creative activities for young people and their families. We know that many of our participants live in flats so we’ve been focusing on activities that work in spaces of any size. After Easter we will set up a new term fully online over Zoom or YouTube. Please contact us if you have a young person interested in signing up. 

But online doesn’t replace in person, so we can’t wait to be in the same room as everyone again. Thanks to our grant from the London Borough of Hackney we are looking forward to re-starting our ‘real life’ classes again and seeing everyone in person, just as soon as the physical distancing recommendations allow. 

Collaborators and performers

Each weekday morning we’re gathering with close to 20 of our brilliant performers to do a workout session together, taking turns to lead each day’s session with a different skill or strengthening focus. We know how difficult it is for professional performers to keep their skills up at this time so we’ve been running HIIT sessions, handstand training and ‘sofa acro’ to keep fit and inspired.

We’ve gathered together some links to resources for artists here and are sharing new information about the support that’s available in the UK as soon as we hear about it. If you’re an outdoor or circus performer or company and you need some support navigating the help available, then please drop our Executive Director Lissy a line.

Our Hackney community

All Mimbre staff members have the option of spending some of their work time helping the community. This includes doing shopping for vulnerable neighbours and collecting for the local foodbank in the company van. We’ve collected some resources here in case you want to get involved in similar way in your local community. 

Lifted Tour

We had an exciting summer tour lined up for Lifted, but of course many of those dates have had to be rescheduled or cancelled. We still hope there might be some performances later this summer and we’ll keep you updated.

We can’t wait to bring this show out again and be together as performers with our audiences. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Lifted short film we made last summer, and here are links to videos from other Mimbre shows, Mimbre short films and our fun minifilms from last year’s tour. 

Catch each other

We hope all our participants, audiences and collaborators are safe and well and we’re looking forward to seeing you again very soon. 

It’s never felt more important to catch each other if we fall, even if that is in a virtual sense: a phone call, a text or sending a beautiful image to people you know and love, and to those you think might be lonely or could have fallen through the cracks. Every little gesture matters; together we are stronger!

Love and strength,

Silvia, Lina, Lissy, Anna and Zsófi