Newham Welcomes the World (2007-2012)

The orchestra's 'Newham Welcomes the World' is a community music project based in Newham, with Patrons Rt. Hon. Stephen Timms MP and Lyn Brown MP. Newham Welcomes the World gives a voice to the local community to express themselves through a musical narrative. Each year we are delivering a very different music project, working with different sectors of the local community, leading up to the Olympics in 2012. The piece created in 2007, called The Journey Begins, celebrated Newham and its changing landscape. It also voiced residents' concern at issues such as gangs and the dangers of playing on railway lines. This project involved 400 children from four primary schools (Carpenters, Godwin, Maryland and Nelson), the Newham Academy of Music, and adults from Look Ahead Housing and Care's Learning Disability centres in East London. A final performance took place, attended by over 1300 local people, at ExCel London on 4 July 2007.

In 2008 a new piece of cross-generational musical theatre was created in association with the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Pass the Baton involved an intensive 4-week summer school for young people aged 15-22 who created a new musical from scratch inspired by the stories of older residents. Four sell-out performances were given at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in August 2008, just after the Olympic baton was handed over from Beijing to London.

2009 saw a sports and music collaboration, in which local sports teams created new team anthems and performed them to each other as part of a concert of sport-related music by the New London Orchestra at The Stratford Rex in June 2009. The concert featured a new Overture for the Games by artistic director Ronald Corp, as well as the first ever performance to live orchestra by Newham's internationally-acclaimed Ascension Eagles Cheerleaders, who devised a new routine to DJ Excalibah's Two Step New Step, a reworking of Sousa's classic Washington Post march.

In 2010 the Orchestra turned its attention to dance, and, in association with East London Dance and the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival, produced Bolero Remixed at Canada Square Park, Canary Wharf in July 2010. In the orchestra's third collaboration with East London musician, DJ Excalibah, a new version of Ravel's classic Bolero was created, which included four new sections of dance and world music written by Excalibah. Dancers from Newham schools and colleges, and from C-12 Dance Theatre, were choreographed by Jeanefer Jean-Charles in an exhilarating celebration of regeneration set among the breathtaking architecture of Canary Wharf. The 50-strong orchestra also accompanied a choir from Look Ahead Housing and Care and Selwyn Primary School in a rendition of 'On the Eurostar' from The Journey Begins (the 2007 project). The event was also part of Create 2010 and Big Dance 2010.

Newham Welcomes the World is sponsored by Eurostar, Lend Lease, National Express and Tube Lines. In Training also had funding from the Coutts Charitable Trust and Charles S French Charitable Trust. Bolero Remixed also had sponsorship (through Greenwich & Docklands festival) from DLR and support from Tower Hamlets and Canary Wharf Arts and Events.