Creativity Let Loose!

Over the last few months the selected Creative Commission recipients have been beavering away to develop exciting young people’s participatory projects. Charlotte (SHAR), Dan (leo&hyde), Saul (GRAFT) and Joseph (Theatre in the Rough) update us on their progress to date.

Our Place in the World Now (from SHAR)

We are over halfway through the project now and having completed all the creative sessions we are delving into the making with the young people, here’s Eloise telling us about her experience so far:

“The workshops have given me a lot of inspiration and I’m really excited to be working on creating my own piece with the skills I’ve learned. I find the themes of identity and ‘your place in the world’ interesting so it wasn’t long before I came up with an idea for what I wanted to create. I’ve written a monologue that expresses some questions and thoughts I’ve had for a while. Thoughts about how we perceive the world around us and us and how we use that information to decide how to behave in a situation. I think I’ve decided to have it as a video with visuals instead of me just reading it or it being an interactive thing as I’ve done performances before but never filmed something like this and fancy doing something new. I’ve finished planning out the visuals and now need to think about what I want to do with the audio and then I can begin filming stuff. Being part of this project has taught me some really useful skills and I’ve got to hang out with some amazing and talented people for which I am very thankful!”

We are so excited to see what Eloise and all our participants produce as part of ‘Your Place In The World Now!’

The live screening event will be on the 22nd October. You can get tickets to the event here.

Double Life (from leo&hyde, in partnership with More Music)

Leo&hyde have teamed up with More Music and Lancaster Culture Co-op to look for LGBTQIA+ young people (and allies) from Lancashire to be part of a music video for the song ‘Double Life’ alongside performers from the West End and TV. You can get involved in the video by through singing, dancing, BSL and more.

We are signing up participants for workshops in dance and devising starting this week. Our LGBTQIA+ music video of leo&hyde’s song Double Life has just received our BSL translation, and West End performers are learning their solos too.

Find out more here – https://www.leoandhyde.com/getinvolved.html

Change in a Box (from Theatre in the Rough)

Produced by Theatre in the Rough, ‘Change in a Box’ is a creative resource which promotes active citizenship and encourages young people to stand up, speak out, and be counted. Change in a Box includes a magazine of inspiring stories from history, craft activities – perfect for socially distanced entertainment, and advice for how to make your community a better place.
We’re now halfway through the project, and we’ve been meeting with young people to find out what matters to them. Participants have selected topics they want to learn more about (race, gender equality, and the environment have been chosen among others), and decided what colours and styles the magazine should use. We are now creating the written content and testing out the craft activities. Change in a Box will be distributed to young people in Lancaster during November this year.

Changemakers (from GRAFT)

GRAFT’s Changemakers are a group of young people aged 13-17 based in and around Lancaster who care deeply about equality and want to make positive change in their hometown.

Over the past four weeks we have been working together to look at the role of art in activism and make plans for a socially distanced exhibition to take place around Lancaster physically and digitally in November. The group researched and selected three emerging Black artists to commission for the exhibition. The chosen artists are Habib Hajallie, who creates striking drawings with ballpoint pen on antique texts and maps; Sumuyya Khader, an illustrator and printmaker based in Liverpool; and Herfa Thompson, based in Leeds, who specialises in painting.

Over the coming weeks the group will take a lead on organising the exhibition, deciding which artworks to include in the exhibition and where and how to show them and promoting the exhibition to the local community.

You can find out more about the project here: https://graftlancaster.com/changemakers/
And the artists here:
https://www.habibhajallie.com/
https://www.sumuyyakhader.com/
https://herfathompson.com/