GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

180 Contact Theatre (2009)
At Contact Theatre in Manchester, mentoring
and the peer-led concept are infused into
the entire organisation, with young people
13-30 encouraged to participate in every
aspect of its venue management and live
performance program. It has been set up as “a
young people’s theatre, where you can grow,
learn and make decisions as a young artist,
audience member, organiser or leader.” 180
Young people are often trained ‘on the job’
to create and/or manage a range of live
performance events in genres such as dance,
theatre, spoken word, live art, installation or
music. Young people are recruited and paid to
be on the board and are requisite members
on staff interview panels. Some even facilitate
workshops for adults on how to work with
young people. Suzie Henderson explains
that Future Fires is Contact’s most intensive
leadership program, originally inspired by a
visit from Afroreggae, a Brazilian music group
that engage arts as a tool for community
activism. The yearlong scheme amplifies the
idea at the heart the peer-led philosophy:
Young people are given the opportunity to
have training and development and come
up with their own project they’d like to run
within the community or with a group of
people they are connected to or feel a part
of or think they want to work with. And
they’re supported to have all the skills that
they need to manage that project from
concept right through to delivery. They
learn how to raise funds, how to manage
the budget, they have risk assessment
training, job protection training and so on.
They learn about marketing and a whole
range of skills. They have mentors as part
of that and training for them as a group.
There’s some training that may help them
to find individuals that they need because
of the nature of their project. And then,
either on their own or in pairs, they can run
these projects.
The whole program is a year, including all
of their developments. It might be four
months in before they actually start to
work with their group. Last time, we piloted
that program with five young people, and
we had everything from somebody making
a film, to a hip hop project with young
people, to street-theatre Carnival based
projects, so quite different outcomes.
In Australia, peer-led style learning has not
been as common an offering amongst the
programs of contemporary arts institutions.
This may be because the government’s youth
arts policies, which have always positioned
young people as creators in their own
right, have gvien rise to well established
organizations that already provide these
kinds of opportunities, such as Youth Arts
Queensland (YAQ) and Propel Youth Arts
WA, or youth-driven arts festivals, like 2High.
The national peak body Young People and
the Arts Australia (YPAA) also does much
to cultivate leadership, energy and other
dispositions of innovation.
What is significant about the initiatives
outlined here is that they offer authentic
opportunities for young people to test
out ideas and practice skills. Testing ideas
is the premise of the Scratch Festival staged
by Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). Renowned
for making some of the most cutting-edge
new theatre in the UK, BAC is housed in a
grand, cavernous building that was once the
Battersea Town Hall. Famous historically for
its radical politicians, the venue is now home
to those who seek ‘to invent the future of
theatre.’ One way it achieves this is by staging
and testing new ideas called ‘scratches.’ In the
words of Alexandra Tomkinson:
Scratches are a process of theatre
development where you start with a
teenyweeny idea, and then get feedback
from that, and then grow the work from
there. I think BAC started that about
10 years ago, and it’s now used all over
the place.
In a festival context, emerging and more
experienced artists take over the building,
attics and all, to present new performance
ideas as little as 5-10 minutes long. These
can be seen alongside full-length, finished
works that evolved through this very process.
BAC says it has built up whole audiences
by inviting them to be stakeholders and
constructive critics of works-in-progress.
Alexandra Tomkinson explains, “we say ‘Come
and be part of creating the next best idea…
you might see the thing that ends up on the
main stage in the National Theater in three
years time. Be part of that journey’.” BAC
also has a range of curriculum-connected
projects for schools, and as their relationships
with teachers and students have developed
they have brought the culture of ‘scratches’
into classrooms. With the regular practice of
methods such as these, innovation skills and
dispositions can be exercised and affirmed.
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 55