News

Last week 105 young people received their art parks and
started off on their CashBack journeys. Over the next 4 weeks young people are
getting stuck in to Digital Art, Performance, Visual Art and Music with our
fantastic tutors.

The first week was all about getting the young people set up
on Zoom and the private Facebook groups and getting to know each other. It may
have only been a week but the groups had made a flying start in their workshops,
looking at their shared theme of ‘Identity, Unity, Solidarity.’

The Music group were
quick to set up a Spotify playlist that they can listen to during their workshops
and have had sessions on body percussion, have jammed to a few songs and tutor
Hugh has even got them to try writing a song on the theme of gratitude. We
can’t wait to hear some of these songs as the weeks go on.

The Digital
participants have been doing lots of drawing activities, including continuous line
drawings, optical illusion drawing and zentangle patterns. They also started
thinking about the shared theme of ‘Identity, Unity, Solidarity’ focussing on
what identity means to them and creating digital identity collages.

The tutors have found that the group have bonded quickly and
seem comfortable with each other. They have one young person who suffers from
extreme anxiety and was reluctant to be part of calls and put her camera on but
out of nowhere during one of the sessions she was full of voice and put her camera
and audio on during a drawing session. Digital tutor Calum said; “She was fully engaged, brave, confident and
had a laugh. It was such a strong moment.”

The Visual team
spent the week getting to know each other and exploring identity. Where they created some finger people
drawings with costumes and background. They
also thought about all the elements that come together to make them, and
designed an identity page that gives away some secrets to their identity.

They have also been having calm moments by creating doodle
pages. Designing their own new doodles
and teaching the rest of the group how to draw them.

The older Visual
group, those 16+ have been drawing themselves as animals based on their characteristics
and interests as an introduction of themselves. They built on this during the sessions designing their own avatars to
use as their zoom profile pictures. Drawing exercises and mark making followed
and they had a nice calm end to the week having some time to work on their own
projects and listening to music. Breathing and stretching has become a part of
most of the sessions to help ease into the day.

Lastly the Performance
groups. The younger group have been working on a group poem and have some (silly)
limericks, a short story and poems with monologues being worked on. The tutors
commented on the talented writing, positive attitudes and keen participation
over the first week and hope it continues.

The older Performance
participants took part in their first character writing and developing workshop.
Drawing a new character in order to be easier to visualise them and then
continued with establishing some basic facts about them. The young people put
their amazing creative brains to good use as they established the universe
their characters exist within and they came up with information that made their
work very exciting! They were also asked to write a monologue for their
character, something that the person would like to talk about if they had the
world’s attention for 15 minutes. The results were incredible and they varied
from description of their favourite burger, to mermaid ballerinas advocating
for clean oceans.

Tutor Sofia also got the young people writing their own
fairy tales! Re-naming objects within their spaces and coming up with
alternative uses for them. The young people had to choose one object and write
its diary from that morning, how has that object experienced their day so far?
As expected the amazing ideas started flowing and soon enough they had created
alternative universes, villainous frogs and heroic boots who were there to save
the day.

The groups have taken the virtual workshops and Zoom
sessions in their stride, easing themselves in to the new world we are
currently living in. As expected some young people have found it more
challenging than others but the tutors and youth workers are working with each
young person on an individual basis as well as a group setting to help
encourage them to engage in the sessions. There has been really positive
progress and feedback in the first week and we can’t wait to see what next week
brings!