Every year there is a department of the festival who are dedicated to seeking out new or under represented audiences. Our outreach team this year (Carly Dandy, Margaret Bakosi and Francesca Balchin) have worked extremely hard to seek out young people interested in performance for a series of workshops that explore ways of generating music, performance and poetry.
Carly, head of outreach, said:
“We wanted to strive to make the outreach projects free, to make it universally accessible, but due to our lack of funding for the department this was a huge struggle. Additionally without participants giving money for a ticket, we couldn’t rely on who would actually show up. Also being held on a Friday clashed with school times, so the demographic that we were initially targeting were all unavailable. All of these issues cropped up along the way, making our department a real work in progress.”
“There was a period of time when there was no-one here and the team felt as though all their efforts had been wasted, which was such a shame. It wasn’t a sense of desperation, more a sense this was a great opportunity people were missing. But people came and the workshops were a success!”
I was lucky enough to experience a showing of the work created by the poetry performance workshop. Led by the outstanding poetry performer Indigo Williams, these bright young things explored themes of love and identity with such power and grace, it’s hard to believe that none of them had ever performed before. Despite never having met each other, to have created something so raw and inspiring made so much difference to its outcome.
I felt extremely lucky to see such raw, immediate, even accidental work being so generously shared with me. The work was powerful yet playful; inquisitive yet confident and ultimately a very special sharing.
Francesca said, “the thing we wanted to do was to take people from the community that had an interest, but without an outlet or an opportunity. We spent a lot of our time emailing foundations and youth groups but it wasn’t until the last minute that we went into the schools and the estates ourselves that we found how many people were interested. Actually meeting individuals in their community showed how much more integral the actual encounter of speaking and sharing is. We weren’t sure whether the workshop participants would be comfortable performing to an audience after an hour and a half, which was an idea brought to us by the drama workshop leader, Shereen Phillips, but they did and it was amazing, especially with no props, no lights, just us, them and their words. It was so good, I’m so happy and it was all accidental.”
Monicque, a workshopee who had never performed poetry before said: “ Before the workshop I was nervous, comparing myself to other people, ‘i’m not like this person, or that person’. Everyone came together and brought their own style and thats actually what happened. The adrenaline rush was absolutely crazy, I kept telling myself ‘don’t slip up, don’t forget your words’. My heart was rushing. But the more engaged the audience were, the better I felt. Indigo said to us “if you want them to believe you are orange with pink dots, you have to believe, just make them believe whatever you want. Whatever you call poetry, its poetry. Its better to set off your own trend, than to follow someone elses.”’
This is the first ‘Live Feed’, in which I will be blogging instantaneously throughout the festival itself. Please excuse the spellings and bad sound on recordings. Think of these as rough cut diamonds if you will. Written by James Cawson, Thanks to Indigo Williams, Andres Hackett, Shereen Phillips and Natalie Sharp