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The Ark is committed to providing innovative high quality arts experiences that enrich children’s lives. We are confident in the capacity of such experiences to engage children’s minds and to embrace entertainment that is not superficial and education that is not didactic. The Ark does not focus on ‘building the audience of the future’, much less ‘the artists of the future.’ Instead we are committed to children as citizens of here-and-now, with every entitlement to quality arts experiences as part of the tapestry of their lives.
The Ark is a ‘producing house’ rather than a ‘receiving venue.’ Most of the time we present work we have developed and/or commissioned ourselves. Occasionally, we present work by visiting companies and organisations, but usually in a context which we have defined.
Being a producing house allows us to develop programmes which:
- Take account of different developmental needs of children;
- Acknowledge that children are makers/doers as well as listeners/viewers;
- Make connections between the arts and the rest of human experience;
- Position childhood experiences as worthy of deep exploration through the arts;
- Create site specific exhibits and theatre pieces which exploit the architectural character and technical resources of our building;
- Enable us to act as a research laboratory where the future shape, content and direction of art for, by, with and about children is being explored and devised;
- Investigate the relationship between art and cutting edge technology with regard to children, as we do in our partnership with Media Lab Europe.
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