#bigtelly

On Saturday Gemma and I held our first ‘Listen Up’ workshop. It was great, and we wanted to share more about it and about the ‘Listen Up’ project in general. 

Gemma and I will be working with children from the care system in 5 different towns in Northern Ireland. We’ll hold taster workshops in Lurgan, Larne, Ballymena, Antrim and Portstewart, and then after that, we’ll meet for further sessions across two months, working towards creating a new performance exploring themes suggested by the young people. We’ll engage a DJ (James Kirkpatrick), a film maker, and other guest experts and facilitators to empower the children to create a layered, high quality and inventive piece of theatre that will be showcased to an invited audience at the end of March.

We’re really excited, and so were the young people we worked with on Saturday.

They were brilliant - both Gemma and I were totally blown away by the level of talent in the room. The young people were so perceptive, curious, engaged and thoughtful. They worked so quickly to create a really lovely bond within the group. As with any new project, we were so aware of the need to respond to the needs of the group, but these young people only ever asked for more and more, so everyone ended up working really hard throughout the afternoon.

That’s until it was time for pizza...we all stopped when the Domino’s delivery arrived! But conversations about music, movement and theatre continued. 

Our next workshop will be on Saturday in Ballymena. Watch out for guest posts from participants, photos and videos throughout the project. 

This project is funded by Children in Need.