Learning Disability Week 2022

Here’s five of our favourite things from the previous 12 months to mark and celebrate Learning Disability Week 2022.

1. In the Garden

Proud and Loud Arts’ performer, Phillip Breadney was featured in HOME’s Open Exhibition in 2022. His piece ‘In the Garden’ was selected and shown alongside 542 other artworks and seen by up to 33,000 visitors in their exhibition space throughout Jan – March 2022.

Phillip would like to develop more work to reach (even) more people and is looking forward to figuring out the ‘what, when, why, and how of doing it’.

2. Look Out

Throughout the previous 12 months we’ve seen and experienced 10 different pieces of theatre or art exhibitions across 8 amazing cultural venues in Greater Manchester. These outings are a great chance to get together, connect with one another, and see things that we wouldn’t all usually see.

Our absolute favourite outing was at The Palace Theatre to see Beauty and the Beast. We were finally all together again following a couple of years of shielding, isolation, and later meeting in smaller groups. Here’s to the next one!

3. A New Group

It’s been just over a year of meeting in-person with our new performance group who meet in the stunning and newly refurbished Contact every week.

What began as a small group of 4 founding members emerging from Covid-19 lockdowns, is now a budding creative space for 12 performers to explore all things theatre and performance.

4. Daryll’s Part to Play

Daryll Duncan is a British-Caribbean actor living with a learning disability label. He has been acting with Proud & Loud Arts since 2017.

Anybody who has spent even a moment with Daryll will know about his incredible energy and enthusiasm and so when we began bringing new performers into the Proud and Loud Arts family Daryll took the position of Peer Support Worker to welcome and encourage our new group.

Daryll says about his role: ‘I enjoy working with the new group, and it’s been amazing because it’s building my experience up and it will look good on my CV’.

5. A Future Together

In April we brought together the former professional practice group to work together to create ideas of what we want the engagement programme (and beyond) to be from September onwards.

We’ve loved meeting together to collaborate and design the future of Proud and Loud Arts!