We are excited to announce that we’ll be exhibiting at this year’s Showman’s Show at Newbury Showground, where you can ask us all your questions about Play The Rig.
Play The Rig is a hands-on experience that combines music, creativity, and sustainability – a unique upcycled percussion installation designed for family days and events!
Made from repurposed every day and vintage materials, this interactive installation allows participants of all ages to explore the world of rhythm and sound while highlighting the importance of recycling and upcycling.
Whether you’re an event organiser, a family entertainment specialist, or anything in between, come and have a chat with Amy and Jess who will answer all of your questions about our installation of musical curiosities. We’ll be bringing some of our Rigs along so you can have a play, and visualise how we can bring something a bit different to your event. Dates: 23rd and 24th October Location: Newbury Showground, Avenue C Stand #187
We’ve had some beautiful, sunny summer days recently and we often find ourselves looking at the clear blue sky and dreaming about being in a field with The Rig somewhere. Normally, this is our busiest time of year for music festivals and family days and we love travelling around the country to different cultural events, taking The Rig with us for you all to try.
Alas, it was not meant to be this year.
We want to take the opportunity to send our good vibes to you all, hoping you are all happy and safe and smiling through the difficult times.
Although many of the festivals for 2020 have been cancelled/postponed and we can’t get the Rig to you in person, we’ve been doing lots of virtual bits and bobs to make sure we are still reaching you all in this time with some music fun!
We have created a new playlist on our @playtherig YouTube channel called The Rig Play Zone where we have added lots of “how to” videos and fun musical games. These include:
We’ve got ideas on there for fun musical games and also educational videos about some of the BBC Ten pieces and composers to keep the kids entertained.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you get alerts when we post new videos.
How-to videos on Facebook and Instagram
We’ve also created lots of one minute How-to videos that we’ve posted on our social media platforms. Like you, we’ve been staying at home and have been looking around our houses to see what we can make using bits and bobs we’ve found at home. So far this has included:
musical water jars
plastic bottle boom whackers
bits-and-bobs shakers
oven tray headphones
guitar tupperware
Who knew you could make so much from your recycling bin?!
Rig Memories on Facebook
As we can’t get to festivals ourselves, we’re going to bring the festival to YOU!
We’ve created a Rig Memories playlist on Facebook which features some of our favourite moments at the Rig.
See what The Rig is like in action
Reminisce on an event you saw The Rig at
Get a feel-good vibe seeing so many smiley faces!
Make sure to like/follow our Facebook and Instagram pages to see these videos when they get released.
And finally, just a reminder of what we normally look like and the fun we have…!
What an adventure we had during March and April continuing our work with BBC Ten Pieces. With Arts Council England funding, we visited 9 schools in South London as well as Steven Hawking SEN school in east London and Great Ormond Street hospital school.
During our workshops we went on a scary journey with Peer Gynt to the Hall of the Mountain King and then became soldiers from Mars preparing for war with The Planets by Gustav Holst!
We brought our Music Boxes Mini Rig and bespoke playing cards to help us to find out more about the pieces…
…and get your school involved. There are so many resources for teachers as well as brilliant activities, videos and mp3s for children to get busy with classical music everywhere!
Wet, wild and wonderful – this years WOMAD festival was amazing as ever! We survived the storms with our fantastic team of Becky Browne, Meg Brooks, Sazzy Fish and Josh Copperfield.
Our first festival of the season, and what a lovely festie it was! A real family treat with a million things to keep the little ones happy. Our team for this festival was Amy & Becky (of course!) with the wonderful Joe and Poppy helping. Despite there being a few rain storms, we all just put on every item of clothing we had and flew The Rig fun flag!
We had some wonderful kids come to play The Rig, including these two little diamonds:
Joe wowed people with the ‘Magic Grill’ which is his new name for our ‘Oven Tray Headphones’ as, well, it is a grill and it is, of course, magic…
The new additions to our Rhythm Mini Rig and Bells Mini Rig went down a treat – with teapots, bike bells and an abacus!
We finished the festival off by watching Lady Smith Black Mambazo which was absolutely brilliant – they are so talented and are so refreshing to watch, as they know how to have fun on stage while still being musically perfect.
Dates: 23rd and 24th October
Location: Newbury Showground, Avenue C Stand #187
