Rhythm of Summer

What an incredible summer it has been! Play the Rig brought its upcycled musical playground to festivals and family days across the country, and the response was phenomenal! From the fields of Camp Bestival to the bustling heart of Southbank Centre, we were thrilled to see people of all ages discover the magic of making music together—using recycled materials, creativity, and a little bit of fun!

Here’s a look back at where Play the Rig was this summer:

Big Church Festival
We started our summer season at Big Church Festival, bringing a joyful noise to the celebration. Hundreds of participants—young and old—experimented with sounds, rhythms, and melodies in a vibrant, interactive experience that added even more harmony to the festival’s spirit.

Godiva Festival
At Godiva Festival, we joined the fun of their “world” theme giving a space for festival-goers to create music and make their own upcycled instruments within this theme.

Camp Bestival Dorset & Shropshire
We hit two amazing editions of Camp Bestival, first in Dorset which we had the joy of attending last year, and then Shropshire for our first time! Festival-goers couldn’t resist our hands-on, eco-friendly music installation in this family specific festival.

Southbank Centre
The iconic Southbank Centre was the perfect setting for Play the Rig to turn heads and spark creativity. Visitors enjoyed exploring new ways to make music, as we set our up our beautiful Rigs and arts and crafts zone in the atrium of one of London’s most celebrated cultural spaces.

Chrisp Street Market
Bringing Play the Rig to Chrisp Street Market wrapped up our incredible season and was a delightful urban experience! We set up our upcycled musical playground in the middle of the bustling centre, engaging local families, shoppers, and curious onlookers alike, turning an ordinary day into a lively community celebration.
Thank You for Playing the Rig!
We are deeply grateful to everyone who played, danced, and shared in the joy of our upcycled musical playground. Your enthusiasm for creativity and sustainability made every festival unforgettable.

Stay tuned for more exciting events coming soon! We’re already planning our next adventure, and we can’t wait to see you again.

Follow us: @playtherig

Summer fun for The Rig

We have had the most incredible summer! Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Festivals and Family Days

The summer kicked off with two brilliant family days- the Crawley Festival on 28th June and the Village Green Festival on 13th July.

We then went to WOMAD at the end of July – which has been a firm fixture in The Rig calendar for the last 5 years – and set up camp in the kids field. As usual there were some amazing outfits – check out the octopus playing the Pixie Rig!

We were also at the Smithfield Street Party on August bank holiday and finished our summer festival season of at the End of the Road festival at Larmer Tree Gardens.

Rig Makeover

We were very thankful to get funding from Arts Council England for some of our projects this summer which has included giving the Rig a little makeover! Amy and Marianne took a couple of days in August to add some additions to the Rig and make it look sparkly again!

Great Ormond Street Hospital

A summer highlight was spending the day with the patients and families at Great Ormond Street Hospital. We made shakers and explored the Rig… and a very cute family of mice was even made!

What’s next?

Keep your eyes peeled for our next Rig adventures. Our next event is 5th and 6th October 2019 at English Heritage site Wrest Park where we will be set up alongside a food festival!

You can keep up to date via the events listing on our website and via our various social media platforms.

https://www.facebook.com/PlayTheRig/

BBC Ten Pieces Live!

On Wednesday 13th May 2015 we were lucky enough to go to BBC Ten Pieces Live at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank to hear the BBC Concert Orchestra perform the Ten Pieces of music that formed this project. It was such a brilliant event, with the hall packed full of excited children that couldn’t wait to hear the music. Their enthusiasm and excitement was palatable and I loved how they started clapping when the pre performance music came on. You’d never find an adult doing that, spontaneously clapping along to the intro music, just because if felt good to, in a hall full of other adults!

The children had their excitement rewarded as we were taught how to sing Zadok The Priest by some of the BBC Singers, led by Rebecca (a wonderfully enthusiastic lady who I’ve been lucky enough to do workshops with before) and later on taught some of the body percussion parts to the Anna Meridith body percussion composition, Connect It. With these two audience interaction pieces interspersing the rest of the pieces, the children were enraptured by watching a live orchestra play and feeling a little bit emotional it bought a tear to my eye seeing their joy, and goosebumps on my body hearing the whole of the hall (about 2,000 people) singing Zadok The Priest with an live orchestra.

What a day! As some of you might know, the inspiration lady who was leading this project, Katy Jones, sadly died a few weeks ago. I couldn’t help observe what a wonderful legacy she has left. Lucky children.

Our day at Plumcroft School

We spent a wonderful 2 days at Plumcroft School where we worked with lots of wonderful children and made a video to prove it!

They have put it up on their website with a lovely description of our time together…

http://www.plumcroftprimary.co.uk/news/?pid=3&nid=1&storyid=11

BBC Ten Pieces schools workshop tour 2014

What an exciting adventure we’ve just had!

Funded by the generous people at Arts Council England, we have visited 10 schools across South London over the last 6 weeks and conducted wacky musical workshops based around the fabulous BBC’s Ten Pieces project that aims to encourage a generation of children to get creative with classical music. We took 5 of the published Ten Pieces and together learnt about their composers, instruments, melodies, rhythms and fun facts!

Team Rig having all the blurry fun

We used our Bells Mini Rig to play the tunes of Grieg’s ‘In the hall of the mountain king’; Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony’ and Mozart’s ‘Horn Concerto No.4’; we used our improved Rhythm Mini Rig to improvise storm sounds like in Britten’s ‘Storm from Peter Grimes’; we learnt facts about all 5 pieces by playing games using our bespoke playing cards; we learnt the scary and thrilling stories of Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ and the Grieg by playing a quiz; and we heard the beautiful melody of the Stravinsky through our *NEW* Music Box Mini Rig which has 1940’s car horn ear trumpets at each end…..and all of this in an hour…. pheeeew!!

Our new and improved Rhythm Rig!

Filming the music box Rig

But that’s not all… our website now has 3 more ‘How To…’ video guides for everyone to watch and you can see a video that shows us leading the workshops in Plumstead School! Even if you didn’t participate in the workshops, have a look and try making yourself an instrument at home – what about a home made Hosepipe Horn?!

Here is our video taken at Plumcroft primary school of us running our workshops…

Filming our ‘How To…’ guides

We now have 4 more videos up on our website filmed and edited by the incredible Clare Greenaway.

Our 2 new ‘How To…’ video guides will get you creating music at home for less than a fiver. Ever wondered how to make your own French horn from a hose pipe or hear the chiming of bells through oven tray head phones?? Well, wonder no more!

And here is our summary video of everything we learnt in The Rig‘s BBC Ten Pieces workshops in South London primary schools…

But, well, that’s not all – we also had a brilliant video filmed live on one of our workshop days at Plumcroft primary school… have a look!

Woweeeeee… thank you Clare!

Rig science day!

How lucky we are here at The Rig!

Last week we met the wonderful Dr Mark Richards – head of Physics outreach at Imperial College London.

As part of our grant from Arts Council England, we wanted to increase our knowledge in regards to sound waves and the conduction of sound and have an expert look at some of our designs.

We spent a marvellous and informative 3 hours with Dr Richards who inspired us with his extensive knowledge on the subject. If only all Physics teachers were as handsome and charismatic, we may have signed up for science sooner!

Prior to this, we had taken a trip to the Science Museum to gain inspiration from the experiments in their Launch Pad learning zone for children. We found a sound experiment very similar to our Oven Tray Headphones that uses a piece of copper rod connected to music that you clenched your teeth around to hear the music through bone conduction.

Sound experiments at The Science Museum, London

Copper/sound experiment

Copper sound experiments at The Science Museum

So now, fellow Riggy Wiggers – we’re all scienced up, and can tell you all about the waves created by our Water Gongs or why the copper tube conducts the sound in our Music Box Mini Rig!

Summer 2014 – Festival madness

Wow!!!! What a summer that was! We were privileged to be at a bunch of cracking festivals and The Rig was played and enjoyed by thousands of children. Big shout out to all the lovely festival people at Mycenae House, Cornbury, Chilled In A Field, WOMAD, The Geffrye Museum and End of The Road. Photos to come soon. It’s been a blast!

Edit: Photos all uploaded, go find yourself!

Playing a hosepipe like a trumpet!

Here at The Rig we are constantly looking for new ideas and new ways to make music. For one of our latest projects we are turning hosepipes into French Horns.

Here is one of Becky’s friends, street performer Pete Dobbing, playing one of these in his street show during Edinburgh Festival 2014.

Launch of the new Mini Rigs – The Mini Rigs Collection

The Mini Rigs Collection: what every Rig should be wearing this season.

May we present our four new Mini Rigs!

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1. The Water Gong and Victorian Tin Bath Mini Rig

2. The Rhythm Mini Rig

3. The Telephone Mini Rig

4. The Bells, The Bells!!!

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These 4 new Mini Rigs were generously funded by the fabulous people at Arts Council England to help us develop The Rig to be accessible to all. We designed the Mini Rigs so they can be played by wheelchair users and small children and have tried to cater for people with differing disabilities, for example creating booklets with large print, braille, and pictures with describing words. We have created drum beaters that have foam handles and have one Mini Rig (The Bells, The Bells!!!) which can be played with your hands for those with limited motor co-ordination. We have a small metal bucket version of the Victorian Tin Bath which can be lifted into the lap, and we can unscrew the blue buckets from the side of The Rhythm Rig to be placed on the laps of those in wheelchairs.

On our Bells Mini Rig, the notes on the sheet music matches the colour of each bell so you can just play your ‘colour’ if you don’t read music. We have also numbered the coloured bells to help those with colour blindness.

We have once again tried to get some sciency bits in, ‘sneaky education’ styleee as Becky likes to call it, by having booklets about sound waves and the science behind how we hear, as factoids for people to tell each other through the Telephone Mini Rig. Our new Water Gong Mini Rig shows how sound waves travel in water and our Victorian Tin Bath shows how sound travels and amplifies in metal.

Last but definitely not least we have The Rhythm Mini Rig as a good ‘ole bang along bit, cos every Rig should have a blue drum!

We dare you not to learn something from this!!

Many thanks to Marie-Cecile Embleton for superb photos as always and exceptionally quick editing. To Stefan Cuthbert Baker and Clare Louise Greenaway for the loan of the studio lights. A big shout out to Mick Simmons for helping us with this project and for being on the receiving end of many a phone call that goes something like, “Can we use yacht varnish on stainless steel to make it scratch proof” at 8.30am in the morning. Suzanne Bull and Gideon from disability charity Attitude is Everything for all their friendly help, advice and education. Our Occupational Therapist friend, Tai Frater for her help and advice. Ray at Sunshine International Arts for being so lovely and hiring out his studio for the photoshoot. Our flatmates for putting up with us turning our houses into Rig workshops over the last three weeks and all our other amazing friends and family for all their help and encouragement. We hope you all get to come and play on the Mini Rigs very soon!

Lastly, people have asked us if making The Rig suitable for wheelchair users and those with disabilities is the way we are going forward with this project i.e turn it exclusively into a music disability project and the short answer is no.
We believe that music (and life) should be accessible for all and it is society that needs to change to allow those with disabilities to interact as easily as those without disabilities do. This is called the Social Model of Disability and we suggest you have a quick Google of this concept. This is something we have learnt about during our journey and by making our Mini Rigs accessible for all, we are taking our own small steps in improving our social world. We welcome any suggestions on how we can improve what we have already done.

If you would like any information on The Rig or how you can go about making your own unique projects suitable for those with disabilities etc, please do get in touch, we are much more ‘copyleft’ than ‘copyright’ type people, so please, do contact us and we’d be very happy to chat to you and share our learning.