Arts in the Community

What is community arts?

Community arts is about coming together with people fortunate and less fortunate in performing. With different social and cultural backgrounds, it is a time to mix people together to make them realize they have similar interests and that they aren't as different to each other as they think they are.

Community arts is a learning process, you learn skills in performing and even unlock some talent which you never thought you'd have, it makes people become more confident with in themselves. But most importantly its a learning process for you aswel, you learn from your clients each time you facilitate or teach as they have a great impact on you as you do on them. You learn how to deal with different situations in society and gain more knowledge on the different people and  how inclusive you can make things in the community.

By running workshops or creating a piece of material you give your clients a different outlook on life and also make citizens have a different outlook on there lifes, I.e; people with disabilities or youth offenders. Making people see that they do have talents and are able to put them to work and create amazing performances which they never themselves even thought they could do.

It is by - working with a client group to help them perform their own piece, for - to perform for your client group, this can be interviewing them to get memories or events that's happened in their life and perform it to them i.e; reminiscent theatre and with - working with your client group to create a piece together.

 

Community arts is all about believing that performing means more than just performing, you believe that performing can help you and those around you.

Using my own experience in community arts looking at the skills, rolls and responsibilities needed to run a project. One of the projects I had done was based at 'Age UK Thornton Heath.'

First of all to break the ice and to not patronize our clients by jumping straight into the performing sides of things, we sat down 5 facilitators to each client and spoke to them introducing ourselves and getting to know one another. 

In different groups we ran workshops, these being; a dance warm up, vocal warm up, a short performance piece which would later be adapted towards the big performance at the end and another dance warm up.

Having in mind that our clients where the elderly we had to take in consideration that some of them would not be able to stand for long and be able to do certain things others can do, so we made sure we was flexible within our workshops. In the dance warm up we adapted it by asking if anybody would like a chair, so they could do the warm up sitting down. While showing everybody the dance warm up examples, we would then afterward show another way to do the move in a more subtle manor which would be more easier for them. By not being bias and thinking that every old person could not do the same things that we could do, we would ask them instead of tell them, so they could have the chose to do it either the original way or adapted way.

After 4 sessions with the clients we finally came to the final workshop; the short performance piece. We decided to do this workshop last because performing is about confidence, working together in a group to get ideas and knowing what each others good at. So we done the warm ups first so we could gain more of a relationship with the clients, not pressurizing them into doing anything they didn't want to do.

We got given newspapers which we would then read to get a story from for our stimulus, not forgetting our client was there we asked her/him if they felt this was a good story to use or not. Having got our story we shared ideas and treated our client like one of us to make them feel more comfortable and like they wasn't put on the spot, but remembering that they was still our client. With all the ideas intact we got up on our feet and start rehearsing our piece and bringing our ideas together, seeing if our client wanted to be in the limelight we asked her/him if they wanted to be the main character or if they was too nervous to do so which was fine, making them have a choice rather than us giving them a role without seeing if they was happy with it or not. 

After completing all workshop tasks and gaining a good relationship with our clients, we started the process of our main performance piece (reminiscent theatre).

First of all in the same groups we was in for our 'short performance pieces' we had to interview our clients on there childhood memories, and also ask them questions on how they think things have changed from back in there days to now. Making sure no one hit a nerve or asked too much of a deep question, we made sure we had our questions ready a week before hand in lesson, making sure they where appropriate to ask.

When we finished the interview process we went away for 2 weeks not seeing our client group, to rehearse our pieces. As our piece was based on their memories we had to make sure the way we performed it didn't look like we was taking the mick and look as if were not taking it seriously enough. It was hard to do so but in the end when we showed our client groups our performances they loved it and was laughing all the way through.

Working with age UK I learnt a lot; how much the elderly is actually able, how to use my voice not to be patronizing, how to present myself in a manor where I seemed polite and confident and how to teach the older generation with having the same knowledge to respect my elders and to take in consideration that they are older.

When I worked with age UK I worked for and with.