Skylarker - Meet the Team!
Pip Jones is a storyteller, mindfulness teacher and movement coach.
She has had a long career in the creative and participatory arts – first devising street theatre performances that toured internationally, then teaching in Higher Education and working with schools and in the community.
Pip has run many projects that nurture and celebrate children’s imaginations through storymaking and sharing. She is currently working with James Richardson on “The StoryExplorers” involving interactive performances and workshops for families to have fun and connect creatively together.
Alongside her work with children and families, Pip leads classes for adults in her garden studio. She teaches evidence-based Mindfulness Courses to cultivate participants’ innate capacities for wisdom, clarity and compassion, and Hanna Somatics to release habitual tension in the body so that people can move with more ease and freedom. She has also created “Shimmy in the Shed” - uplifting and joyful dance-fitness classes.
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
