Our Story

Annie and Jacqui met at Chats Palace Arts Centre in Hackney – we worked together in community arts with disadvantaged young people and adults creating plays and musicals.

We created ‘MixCO’ and made arts programmes for older people and for children including touring shows, workshops and holiday clubs.

Annie focussed on theatre directing and community arts whilst Jacqui went into education.

But we still managed to perform together and deliver creative projects when possible.

A telephone conversation led to us thinking about how best we could use the power of the arts  and our experience of diversity to improve lives and help people of all ages develop resilience

We established JaZanne to give us the opportunity to work together and develop arts programmes that could support older people and children.

We formally became a CIC with our advisory group made up of older people from mixed cultural backgrounds.  We devised and delivered ‘Stepping Stones’, a resilience programme, in schools across North London.

In addition we started to conduct research for our ‘Exchanging Dreams’ touring theatre production. For this we had the pleasure of interviewing and delivering 10 workshops for 45 residents living with dementia in homes and day centres as well as older people from Caribbean centres and luncheon clubs.

We had training from Entelchy Arts and Spare Tyre about making theatre for audiences living with dementia and  toured ‘Exchanging Dreams’ as an R+D in both North and East London to 150 older people, carers and staff, along with 6 older volunteers.

This was very well received by audiences, carers and support workers.  We also continued to deliver our ‘Stepping Stones’ programme in new schools.

We decided to focus on work with older people and those living with dementia in order to develop resilience, ‘successful aging’ and quality of life.

We undertook training with a range of experienced artists  to develop our skills in dance, singing and design.

We also trained with Arts 4 Dementia and Age Exchange in order to develop our understanding of using the arts to work with those living with dementia.

We were successful in securing funding, to develop and tour ‘Exchanging Dreams’. 

With lockdown restrictions in place we had to move the tour dates, but the development went ahead as planned.

We also ran a new online training programme going into 2021, writing and performing radio plays with participants of two independent older people’s theatre groups called ‘Through My Window’.