Junior Mermaid Dates

We have dates for our Junior Mermaids summer classes and courses

Wednesday 31st May: Taster Class
Yorkshire Life Aquatic will be running a taster class for 8-12 year olds, It is a Junior Synchronised swimming style water dance session. It is creative swimming and water dance course using synchronised swimming techniques to combine exercise with creativity, making exercise accessible and fun.
The sessions comprise of 30 mins on land choreography then 1 hour in the pool with tutors Lucy (Synchronised swimmer) and Zoe (Choreographer).
You will learn basic synchronised swimming skills and develop a routine. It is a great way to build up confidence and ability in the pool and make new friends.
Please book places through Bramley Baths. £3.00 per Child

Week long courses:

Dates: 7th – 11th August
21st – 25th August
8-12 year olds week long Junior Synchronised swimming style water dance course.
It is creative swimming and water dance course using synchronised swimming techniques to combine exercise with creativity, making exercise accessible and fun.

The sessions comprise of 30 mins on land choreography then 1 hour in the pool with tutors Lucy (Synchronised swimmer) and Zoe (Choreographer).

Over the week you will learn basic synchronised swimming skills and develop a routine which will be performed at the end of the week for friends and family. It is a great way to build up confidence and ability in the pool and make new friends. So come and join the junior mermaids!

Please book places through Bramley Baths

We are looking for people to join us at Beeston Festival in Cross Flatts Park on 6th June, to create a “Birds Eye” View Display using patterns, shapes and people.  We are hoping that you can come along and join us!

Our mission is to create with festival goers a “birds-eye’ view display to celebrate and send a hopeful message for people using words and patterns. We will be spelling out “Close the Gap’ as a message of hope for our communities. For this to have the most effect we need people – as many as possible -all ages, cultures and backgrounds. We welcome everyone to join us. The highlights will be captured from above with a camera and mini helicopter device. we hope to evolve a “birds-eye message” of hope and joy to celebrate communities everywhere at Beeston Festival.

No swimming costumes necessary – Just bring yourselves and your friends. We will begin assembling people at 12 and the activity starts at 1pm.

Hope to see you there!!

The Mermaids are now members of East Street Arts!

East Street Arts is a contemporary arts organisation in Leeds. who focus on the development of artists through our events programme, membership activities, professional development and studio/facility provision. Check out their website HERE.

They are great for helping to supporting and promoting artists in the region check out our ESA Profile HERE

Great news about our Bramley Mermaids Club, we have just recieved a letter to say our latest funding bid has been sucessful! This means we are able to run the classes for an entire year and also do some taster classes in other locations in Leeds! We are very happy mermaids right now!

The next block of classes at Bramley Baths start on 2nd March and run for five week blocks. If you are interested in taking part you can book through Bramley Baths or just drop in. So come down and release your inner mermaid!

If you want to know more about the classes you can watch our short promo film.

Many thanks to the Yorkshire Venture Philanthropy Fund for funding the new term.

It’s only January but it has already been a busy new year for YLA, We have been in rehearsals developing a piece which is part performance, part participatory for older people.

It is part of a brand new membership scheme for care homes in West Yorkshire called ‘at hoMe with the arts‘, which is run by ‘We do’ and supported by funding from Arts Council England and The Baring Foundation.
It brings a mixture of different art events into care homes for residents to enjoy.

We have visited two care homes already this year with a fun seaside inspired reminisence piece called ‘Million Dollar Memory’ with posing bathing beauties, getting changed under towels a doing an Esther William’s esque routine (but on dry land of course) We got the residents waving flags and dancing with us to 40’s/50’s tunes. It was a really lovely experience getting to dance and chat with people who grew up in this era. We met some fantastic people with great stories to tell. We are really looking forward to the next event.

Find out more about at hoMe here.

Hello everyone!

We would just like to wish you all an absolutely fabulous New Year! It’s been a great year for Yorkshire Life Aquatic.

Our summer project ‘Splash’ our new dry land show saw us performing at all sorts of events including DNweekeND Festival in Doncaster, Yorkshire festival, Beacons Festival, Bathing Beauties Festival in Lincolnshire, Saltaire Festival and Lister Park Reflections Festival.

We also ran a community mermaids and Pirates Splash mob project with people from South Leeds which we performed as part of Leeds Waterfront Festival it was a lovely opportunity to work with young people in the community.

We have continued to work with Bramley Baths and we are now running weekly Mermaid exercise classes at the Baths which are proving rather popular. Our group Bramley Mermaids club even performed at the Bramley Baths summer gala and we are going to Manchester on Valentine’s day to perform at Withington Baths too.

As it’s now a bit too chilly to perform outside we have been branching into Cabaret by developing a new indoor performance which we were lucky enough to be asked to perform at the Hebden Bridge Trades Club, we also performed in the Gaza Fundraiser at Bradford Playhouse and at the new Pudsey venue Café Lux for Cabaret Heaven. We are very excited that we will be performing in London this year at the legendary cabaret night ‘Duckie’ at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern which are really looking forward too!

We have some big plans for 2015 including Bradford Festival, Kirkstall Festival and a special event at Bramley Baths (but we’ll keep that secret for now)

We would like to say a massive thank you to all of you who have supported us over the last two years it’s been an amazing time and we are looking forward to more ambitious events and projects over the next few years to come, so watch this space!

Today we have have launched a campaign to raise money for our community projects by selling limited edition T-shirts & Hoodies with a special edition design.

You can help us by buying a T-shirt and helping us spread the word about the campaign!
Many thanks for your help and support!

Check out the Fabrily website to see our campaign products…..be quick the items are limited! Click HERE to visit the site.

Bramley Mermaids Club made a fabulous ‘splash’ at Bramley Baths’ Summer Open Day. Ten women braved the pool in their polka dot swimsuits and performed a glitzy aqua routine. We have been working with the women from Bramley Mermaids club since May and we have been having such a good time. In the sessions we have been dancing in the water to vintage 1940’s music and learning soem synchronised swimming too! What we all found was that it is surprisingly good exercise and what’s even better is that you are generally having such a good time, you don’t even notice you are exercising.

So we decided it would be a good idea to do a little demonstration at Bramley Baths and we made that optional so some women in the group performed and others didn’t. Our routine included the odd kick line, tip of an imaginary top hat as wel as more traditional synchro moves such as tub, wheel and plank ( oh yes there is a water version of that strenuous gym bunnie move – here its a lot more about poise and balance).

We were lucky enough to have the wonderful Lizzie Coombes there to snap our pictures which really was the cherry on the butter icing on the cup cake! Wonderful! Take a look!