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As part of the Discover Young Hackney '09 Close Event, 'What is the future of Youth Arts?', we posed 3 questions to our panel of key players in the Hackney Youth Arts Scene.
Here's a snapshot of what emerged from the second question:
What do young people gain from taking part in the arts, and how can we ensure that everybody is able to engage?
Panel member Nicola Baboneau, from The Learning Trust, answered that earlier in the day she had been asking some young people what they thought they got from the Arts. Answers included ‘energy’, ‘fun’, ‘not about right answers’, ‘a way to get out of difficult situations’, ‘people listening to us’ and ‘working together’.
Nicola said: “The Arts clearly provide a wealth of opportunities for learning, discovery, participation and inspiring young people to broaden their horizons. And, all our practice in the Arts and in Discover Young Hackney has the key principles of excellence, innovation and diversity. Above all, Discover Young Hackney is not just about a talented few, but it’s about the inclusion of everybody and everyone’s potential.”
Nicola felt one of the greatest strengths of the Arts is their ability to offer new perspectives and experiences. “Creativity maximises learning, developing the capacity to imagine and experience the world differently,” she said. “The Arts can help young people to develop and find their own way, to develop and live in the 20th century, to grow up with all the complexity and diversity which mix social values and different ways of life. I think through the Arts young people learn to thrive on change and develop new worlds for themselves. They learn to imagine as well as gaining the skills, confidence and motivation to make things happen. Above all, in terms of the Arts and Discover Young Hackney, I think we can have a critical debate about the roles of education, creativity and culture, including building communities, economic regeneration and the broader society. So, the Arts for me are at the heart of everything I do.”
For this year’s Discover Young Hackney, the Culture team, in partnership with the local youth arts cluster, developed two main themes: internationalism and disability arts. Providers worked together to integrate those themes, not only for their festival events, but also in their continued professional development for 2010 and beyond. Many providers focused on access to the Arts. Young people were invited to work with a deaf artist as part of the ‘Story of a London Township’ exhibition, hosted by international artist Godfried Donkor at SPACE. One of the highlights this year was also Newtoy’s innovative ‘Wet Sounds’ event – an underwater sound art event that provided a unique and almost ‘scientific’ hearing experience for young deaf people.
Nick Llewellyn from Hackney Shed spoke about the inclusive nature of his organisation. “At Hackney Shed we work in an inclusive way, where our young members attend both special education and mainstream education in the borough. We look at what people can do rather than what they can’t. So, we look at people’s abilities and strengths rather than their disabilities.”
“We have some amazing volunteers who come along and work for free and have a wide range of skills,” he continued. “We work in small groups where people get to know the members of their group, get to know how people communicate and work together. By doing that we start building up our show, which we put on once a year. For us it’s not about top down learning, it’s about empowering young people from the bottom up, and working with people’s abilities.”
At the VIP reception, Tim Aldcroft from the Huddleston Centre outlined his organisation’s work and their recent projects. “We’re a youth project which works with disabled young people in Hackney aged from 9 to 25. We set up what was essentially an interactive game show for young people to make decisions and vote in a way that was fully accessible. Through a series of sessions, they came up with choices, made decisions and voted, and they ended up doing some performances that they wanted to do.”
“We try to work out systems to get everybody involved in the conversation and to take it in the direction that they want to take it,” he added. “In this case, it was a lot of performances. We didn’t know at the beginning of the project that it would go down the performance route, but that’s what they wanted. We’re hoping that over the next year, because of some funding we have received, to carry on the work.”
From disabled-led theatre company Graeae, Rachel Bagshaw spoke about the difficulty of dealing with preconceptions, opportunities for all, and Graeae’s exciting vision for the future. “Following on from what Tim said, and thinking about how people judge you by what you look like and how you speak, and have very, very low expectations about what you can achieve, Graeae is all about challenging those preconceptions and assumptions that we make about people and saying basically that everybody has a right to perform and everyone has a right to be on that stage. Just think, how many deaf and disabled people are there on TV right now? Probably a few. It’s rubbish. It’s 2009. So, let’s really work together so, come 2012, we’re everywhere!”
“We have just started a whole series of workshops in Hackney linked to our play. The play itself is all about challenging perception. That’s our production at the moment. But, our biggest production is a brand new building on Kingsland Road which will be the new home for Graeae, from where we will continue to challenge the landscape of the world out there so that deaf and disabled people are fully included.”
Inclusion has been at the heart of Discover Young Hackney, and Petra Roberts, the Cultural Programme Officer for the London Borough of Hackney, explained the importance of giving ownership to young people at every level of the festival. Explaining some of the ways in which Discover Young Hackney was publicised, she said: “I have discovered three things when it comes to getting young people to take part in Discover Young Hackney: listen, listen and listen some more. The design material for Discover Young Hackney was developed in consultation with young people. They told us what they liked; they told us what would make them pick up a brochure; and our Cultural Ambassadors are spreading the word about Discover Young Hackney by word-of-mouth and through social networking sites like Facebook.”
“Because young people chose the design, because they fed in to the activities they would like to do, and because they own Discover Young Hackney, they are now encouraging their peers to own it too.“
Panel member Nicola Baboneau, from The Learning Trust, answered that earlier in the day she had been asking some young people what they thought they got from the Arts. Answers included ‘energy’, ‘fun’, ‘not about right answers’, ‘a way to get out of difficult situations’, ‘people listening to us’ and ‘working together’.
Nicola said: “The Arts clearly provide a wealth of opportunities for learning, discovery, participation and inspiring young people to broaden their horizons. And, all our practice in the Arts and in Discover Young Hackney has the key principles of excellence, innovation and diversity. Above all, Discover Young Hackney is not just about a talented few, but it’s about the inclusion of everybody and everyone’s potential.”
Nicola felt one of the greatest strengths of the Arts is their ability to offer new perspectives and experiences. “Creativity maximises learning, developing the capacity to imagine and experience the world differently,” she said. “The Arts can help young people to develop and find their own way, to develop and live in the 20th century, to grow up with all the complexity and diversity which mix social values and different ways of life. I think through the Arts young people learn to thrive on change and develop new worlds for themselves. They learn to imagine as well as gaining the skills, confidence and motivation to make things happen. Above all, in terms of the Arts and Discover Young Hackney, I think we can have a critical debate about the roles of education, creativity and culture, including building communities, economic regeneration and the broader society. So, the Arts for me are at the heart of everything I do.”
For this year’s Discover Young Hackney, the Culture team, in partnership with the local youth arts cluster, developed two main themes: internationalism and disability arts. Providers worked together to integrate those themes, not only for their festival events, but also in their continued professional development for 2010 and beyond. Many providers focused on access to the Arts. Young people were invited to work with a deaf artist as part of the ‘Story of a London Township’ exhibition, hosted by international artist Godfried Donkor at SPACE. One of the highlights this year was also Newtoy’s innovative ‘Wet Sounds’ event – an underwater sound art event that provided a unique and almost ‘scientific’ hearing experience for young deaf people.
Nick Llewellyn from Hackney Shed spoke about the inclusive nature of his organisation. “At Hackney Shed we work in an inclusive way, where our young members attend both special education and mainstream education in the borough. We look at what people can do rather than what they can’t. So, we look at people’s abilities and strengths rather than their disabilities.”
“We have some amazing volunteers who come along and work for free and have a wide range of skills,” he continued. “We work in small groups where people get to know the members of their group, get to know how people communicate and work together. By doing that we start building up our show, which we put on once a year. For us it’s not about top down learning, it’s about empowering young people from the bottom up, and working with people’s abilities.”
At the VIP reception, Tim Aldcroft from the Huddleston Centre outlined his organisation’s work and their recent projects. “We’re a youth project which works with disabled young people in Hackney aged from 9 to 25. We set up what was essentially an interactive game show for young people to make decisions and vote in a way that was fully accessible. Through a series of sessions, they came up with choices, made decisions and voted, and they ended up doing some performances that they wanted to do.”
“We try to work out systems to get everybody involved in the conversation and to take it in the direction that they want to take it,” he added. “In this case, it was a lot of performances. We didn’t know at the beginning of the project that it would go down the performance route, but that’s what they wanted. We’re hoping that over the next year, because of some funding we have received, to carry on the work.”
From disabled-led theatre company Graeae, Rachel Bagshaw spoke about the difficulty of dealing with preconceptions, opportunities for all, and Graeae’s exciting vision for the future. “Following on from what Tim said, and thinking about how people judge you by what you look like and how you speak, and have very, very low expectations about what you can achieve, Graeae is all about challenging those preconceptions and assumptions that we make about people and saying basically that everybody has a right to perform and everyone has a right to be on that stage. Just think, how many deaf and disabled people are there on TV right now? Probably a few. It’s rubbish. It’s 2009. So, let’s really work together so, come 2012, we’re everywhere!”
“We have just started a whole series of workshops in Hackney linked to our play. The play itself is all about challenging perception. That’s our production at the moment. But, our biggest production is a brand new building on Kingsland Road which will be the new home for Graeae, from where we will continue to challenge the landscape of the world out there so that deaf and disabled people are fully included.”
Inclusion has been at the heart of Discover Young Hackney, and Petra Roberts, the Cultural Programme Officer for the London Borough of Hackney, explained the importance of giving ownership to young people at every level of the festival. Explaining some of the ways in which Discover Young Hackney was publicised, she said: “I have discovered three things when it comes to getting young people to take part in Discover Young Hackney: listen, listen and listen some more. The design material for Discover Young Hackney was developed in consultation with young people. They told us what they liked; they told us what would make them pick up a brochure; and our Cultural Ambassadors are spreading the word about Discover Young Hackney by word-of-mouth and through social networking sites like Facebook.”
“Because young people chose the design, because they fed in to the activities they would like to do, and because they own Discover Young Hackney, they are now encouraging their peers to own it too.“
Discover Young Hackney '09 Awards
Each question complimented an awards ceremony devised, managed
and delivered by the DYH / Eastside Educational Trust Cultural Ambassadors. The award category for this question was 'Most Accessible Workshop' and the winners were Hackney Shed.
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