OUR PCS COMMUNITY

Something that Performance Collective Scotland thrives on, is the community of creatives we have built over the years. We carry out a number of projects each year to grow and develop our community, encourage socialisation, the sharing of ideas, and support among our artists. We use our community to help artists from rural areas develop their skills, learn from each other and prepare for a career as a creative professional.

Here are some of the projects we have run to build our PCS Community:

EDINBURGH FRINGE TRIPS

Performance Collective Scotland have our annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival day out! We travel to Edinburgh as an ensemble, and try to see as many shows as we can in a day. From physical theatre to hard hitting drama, with a little bit of comedy in between- there is always something for everyone! We visit ensemble members who have shows as part of the Festival and we show our support. Travel costs and show tickets are covered for our members, in order to make the trip accessible for all.

PCS CHRISTMAS

Performance Collective Scotland hosts an annual Christmas Extravaganza! In order to make it as accessible as possible, the event is held online where we play games, sing songs, chat about festive traditions and just generally spread some cheer! Ensemble members are even posted a little gift from the North Pole…

The Wellness ProjecT

In 2024, Performance Collective Scotland introduced our new programme - The PCS Wellness Project.
This is a series of wellness workshops involving meditation, yoga, therapeutic theatre, and creativity sessions. The aim of these workshops was to support the health and wellbeing of artists, by teaching skills and coping mechanisms to actively develop our own self-care practices.
With creative artists facing precarious employment, self-doubt and rejection in the industry, we wanted to introduce a programme to support our cohort, teaching skills to manage stress and resilience.

CULTIVATE

PCS has worked on a number of collaborative projects, including our Cultivate Series with Paragon Music. This aims to help our cohort develop their skills in facilitation, delivering workshops, and creating inclusivity in the arts. So far we have participated in Cultivate Resonate, a series of musical workshops that took place online, and Cultivate Inclusion, a run of in-person training weekends to learn more about how to make our artistic practice more inclusive and accessible.

PCS members attended weekly workshop planning and facilitation sessions led by Paragon musicians and practitioners who specialise in supporting people with access requirements.

We combined our project CULTIVATE with the Paragon RESONATE programme. CULTIVATE was established to develop skills and improve employability across the arts sector for PCS members. This includes practical workshop leader training, programme planning, and collaborating across diverse practices. RESONATE is an exciting art and music project for disabled and non disabled young people (15–25 yrs). This is an opportunity for participants to enjoy creating and discovering music, dance and visual art whilst contributing to regular performances.

Over the course of 6 sessions, PCS members took part in warm up exercises, listened and contributed to all planning discussions, and participated in the final online performance: ‘Lets Go!’

For our Cultivate Inclusion project, we teamed up with Paragon to run three residential training weekends to grow our knowledge of inclusive practices. This took place over three weekends across Stranraer, Kirkcudbright, and Glasgow.

We explored ableism, autism, mental health, diversity, disability, and community, to assess how we create new work integrating these accessible practices. The training examined inclusivity within creative areas such as music, theatre, dance, and movement.