What is Echo Eternal?

Echo Eternal is a commemorative arts, media and civic engagement project, that has seen 14 Birmingham and Coventry schools gifted one of the 112 UK Holocaust survivor’s stories filmed by Natasha Kaplinsky for the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. Launched in Birmingham on Holocaust Memorial Day January 2018, 14 schools have worked with artists to create ‘echoes’ to ensure that these stories are forever remembered. Echo Eternal will run for a further 2 years across the West Midlands before being launched on a national level in 2020 to 2021.

Echo Eternal Project at Finham Park School

Six schools in Coventry joined the Echo Eternal Program in February 2019. Finham Park School have pledged and committed to the Echo Eternal project as one of six schools across the city. We engaged and started to wok with CORE Education with the Echo Eternal project from January 2019 and we have been involved throughout 2020 and we will be involved in 2021 and for time to come as the program expands nationally. Coventry is the second West Midlands city to participate nationally in this project.

Finham Park School has been gifted the Holocaust survivor  testimony of Ruth David. We have partnered with Rockwood school in Birmingham and more recently we have forged project links with Southam College. We have been fortunate to work with multiple schools and student to students group collaborations and working with resident artists has become a huge part of the success of this project for our students at Finham Park School. Our gifted testimony and related work has brought a deeper context for learning about Holocaust and genocide survivors for our youngsters.

Up to 85 students have been engaged in this project to date. In the Summer term 2019 thirty Finham Park School students from different age ranges selected from year 8 to year 12 worked with Highly Sprung Artist Emily Robertson over 4 artist residency days that took place in May 2019. They created a piece of physical theatre titled ‘Life Lines’ this composition was inspired, created and developed in direct response to Ruth David’s testimony and linked case studies from the Holocaust. Our original core group of students committed to workshops so they could gain a sense of context and insights into the core elements of the project.

This student working group performed the choreographed composition in front of a live audience in a sharing day for the project, partner schools from Birmingham, parents and CORE Education and Echo Eternal staff attended this live performance and Q&A session in our theatre on the 21st of May 2019. The group worked with a recording crew River Rea Films company to create a film at Finham Park school inspired by elements of the choreographed composition work our students created with our resident performance artist Emily Robertson.

This phase of the echo eternal project was the catalyst and creative foundation for this project at Finham Park School.

Please view the finished film, see the stills and moving film exerts illustrating and showing our students working with Emily Robertson and the film crew. This part of the project work for Echo Eternal took place from April to July 2019. Flight path permissions and clearance were given for the film crew and drone pilot to use ground and aerial drone film technology to record outdoors the entire performance in the school environment during our filming day on 6th July 2019.

Ruth David - Holocaust Survivor Testimony