Skylarker - Meet the Team!
Pip Jones is a storyteller, mindfulness teacher and movement coach.
After her Degree in Anthropology and English at Cambridge, Pip ran away to join the circus. This took her all around the world, as she toured street theatre performances combining stilts, dance and puppetry.
With the birth of her children, Pip settled in Devon and taught on the Theatre Degree at Dartington College of Arts. Alongside this, she devised performances and workshops for children and families that nurtured and celebrated creativity and connection. This work continues as Skylarker Arts.
Pip now teaches several adult programmes. She runs evidence-based Mindfulness Courses to cultivate participants’ innate capacities for wisdom, clarity and compassion, and Somatics to release habitual tension in the body so that people can move with more ease and freedom. Pip also created “Shimmy in the Shed” - uplifting and joyful dance-fitness classes which started in a cabin in her garden and have now expanded to venues in and around Buckfastleigh.
James Richardson has been professionally involved in the performing arts since 1999 when he began working as a puppet/prop-maker and puppeteer for the renowned theatre company, Puppetcraft.
Since 2007 he has run Angel Heart Theatre, a company dedicated to puppetry and storytelling for all ages. They have created 11 shows, touring extensively throughout the UK, where the quality of the company’s work has been consistently commented on.
In 2022 James began working alongside Pip Jones to co-create Skylarker’s The StoryExplorers. Together they have taken shows, walkabout and workshops to theatres, village halls, schools, museums and libraries, as well as fairs and festivals up and down the country.
A dynamic and engaging performer James is also a skilled artisan in puppet and prop-making, sculpture, masks, folk-art, crafts and set-design. All his creative work is motivated by a life-long passion for the natural world, history, myth and the connection to place.
Lizzie Swinford is a dance practitioner and teacher living in Exeter. She trained at the London Contemporary Dance School and has spent many happy years dancing with children and young people in education and in the community. She collaborated on Paper Capers, All Aboard and The Book Keepers and takes a playful, interactive approach: improvising with children and being led by them. Lizzie is interested in researching creativity and education, her MA examined dance with EAL preschool children. She now works at Ellen Tinkham Special School where the children there are teaching her about their desire for movement and their joy in sensory learning.
Katy Cawkwell has been storytelling for 25 years, featuring in international festivals from India to Iceland, delighting the next generation with regular performances for schools and captivating adult audiences from the Barbican stage to a burial chamber on Anglesey. Previous work includes: Wild Visions, Tristan & Iseult, Rhiannon, The Wounded King, Odysseus & Penelope, The Kingdom of the Heart, Sigurd & Fafnir, The Falcon Bride (Njal’s Saga). She was shortlisted for an Arts Foundation Award and has featured on Radio 3 and 4. She also runs Artemis Storytelling, bringing the best of UK storytelling to Exeter and helping local tellers find their voice.
“compelling and gripping…” Everything Theatre “Fantastic storytelling!” The Story Museum “It was great, it was superb, it was magical, it was enthralling” Ilkley LitFest
Caz Hoar is passionate about holding spaces that deepen connection to ourselves and others offering creativity through story making, movement, music, playfulness, ritual and shared reflection. She is a Dramatherapist with more than 20 years’ experience of working with young people and adults in a variety of settings, including prisons, mainstream and special need schools, community centres and local green spaces. Caz is also an Environmental Arts Therapist and currently co-facilitates Circle of tree workshops, monthly therapeutic groups in nature. These workshops take inspiration from the seasonal cycles and the Celtic Ogham calender, building relationship with ourselves as nature and the more than human world.
The workshops invite time to nourish ourselves, slow down, honour change and
transitions in our busy lives and build connection to feeling- https://www.catdevon.org.uk/our-projects
Caz loves expressing herself creatively through music and has performed in bands over the years and currently sings and performs in The Lost Sound. She lives in Buckfastleigh and appreciates being a part of a wonderful community and feels very fortunate to be able to take time to be in the woods, on Dartmoor and by the coast.
