Department Spotlight: a guest blog post written by Forest Morgan from our Creative Engagement department.
Each year the Creative Engagement team work in and out of the Mercury Theatre building, creating and delivering activities across Essex.
Between April 2025 to March 2026, we engaged with nearly 50,000 participants across our Taking Part programme including Zumba and Pilates classes, educational and visibility work.
It has been a busy year for the team, with some funded projects coming to an end, as well as large scale productions taking place for both our Mercury Young and Mercury Adult companies.
In 2024, we acquired funding from The National Lottery Million Hours Fund enabling us to partner with both the Essex Youth Service and Level Best Café. This enabled us to provide young people arts provision in areas across Essex to upskill, build confidence and self-esteem and to provide positive engagement. In practise, this resulted in three groups in Stanway, Clacton and Basildon youth centres for 13-17 year olds. In addition, we also held a group for 18-30 year olds with SEND at the Mercury Theatre itself.
Fast forward to 2026 and years of work resulted in an amazing showcase event held at the theatre. This brought together all four groups, with young people sharing the work they had done and highlighting the skills developed across the programme. The event was attended by local press, stakeholders, as well as family and friends of the young people involved. The funding enabled us to provide provision which had not been possible before, and we hope to secure further funding which will allow us to continue this work.
In March 2026, we managed to secure £10,000 in funding through the Big Give campaign. This money, made possible by donations, will go towards the continuation of the MYC SEND group which began through the National Lottery project. This is an incredible step towards further work to ensure all four groups can once again take place. Thank you from everyone at the theatre and in our MYC SEND group to anyone who helped us reach our Big Give target.
Since the theatre’s refurbishment in 2020, we formed our Mercury Young and Adult Companies which have weekly sessions throughout term time. This year, both companies took to the stage in full-scale productions. 8-17 year olds in our Mercury Young Company groups were a part of a new adaptation of Wind in the Willows, written by Anne Odeke. With around 120 young people taking part, director Sian Burford-Thomas had one hell of a task. However, with the help of an incredible array of MYC teaching artists and all of the fantastic Mercury departments, the mammoth production came together and became a sell out hit!
A production with that many young people was not enough on its own though, and at the same time in the Studio space I directed the Mercury Adult Company in four performances of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information. 17 incredibly talented local actors, and a highly skilled ‘Robodog’ took part. To find out more about our Mercury Adult Company sessions, click here.
It is never quiet for very long in Creative Engagement and we look forward to the next year of activity. In 2025, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, through their Arts-based Learning Fund, awarded us £187,000 over three years to support our Future Foundations initiative. This is an in-school theatre programme designed to support Key Stage 2 pupils (Years 4–6) across seven Essex schools who are experiencing or at risk of Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA), have SEND, or face potential exclusion.
Delivery for this project begins in September 2026 and our Education Producer, Lisa Warnock, will be writing the next spotlight blog for the team then to provide an update on the programme.
If you have any questions, or are interested in any of the activities mentioned, please contact the Creative Engagement team at [email protected].
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