Learner To leader ‘Love is’ Workshop

The Greater Creative young leaders decided they wanted to work with a creative professional who worked in a different artform to visual art and crafts. They all discussed and voted for the opportunity to work with someone performance based. We commissioned local playwright, musician and poet Andrew Dobb to come and work with the young leaders to develop a session inspired by a valentines theme.

Andrew firstly worked with the young leaders to test some ideas for the session and then went on to collaboratively plan the nuts and bolts of what was to be delivered to younger children in the parish.

Andrew took the opportunity to really push the young leaders into new realms, part of the workshop was about using their physical bodies to tell stories and he also had his guitar in play where they used the song by McFly ‘It’s All About You’ to collectively sing. Although the young leaders were a little bit surprised with this new way of working, by the time they were delivering the session to younger children in the parish they were confident and created a beautiful session for younger children.

When the adults came to pick up the children they got to watch a 10 minute performance their children had made for them on the local stage at the community centre.

Andrew Dobb spoke about how he thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to teach and facilitate on the project and said it had got him thinking about how providing opportunities in his artform locally was important.

The young leaders shared the following thoughts about the workshop:

‘When he first said we were going to sing I hadn’t thought about performance being like a musical and I was really nervous. But seeing the younger children was so cute! They were really good!’

‘It was really different from our usual sessions. I am not sure what I thought it was going to be, but it was different and was good to try something new’

‘it was nice to see the children on the stage with parents watching’

‘I can’t believe we did some singing! It went well though, Andrew was really good to work with’