Doorstep Youth Theatre performing their scratch

Our last two days in Torbay consisted of Doorstep Arts hosting a big event they called TorQuay Takeover where they brought together their various youth groups and guest artists to showcase and experience theatre.

On Saturday, Alia assisted a young theatre artist named Fi with a workshop she hosted for kids at the Library. The workshop was related to the show that would be presented shortly after, enlisting the children in spy- related activities including writing invisible messages in lemon juice, decrypting messages written using the words from library books, and inventing new codes. I decided to sit in on the following children's performance called Bookclub for Super Spies, by Angel Exit Theatre. It ended up being a very engaging play that had the children jumping up and down and running all over the library looking for hidden clues in books and on shelves integrated into the space to help progress the play forward and solve the mystery of stolen happy endings. I was really impressed by the level of engagement and interaction. Overall, I think my favorite part of the experience was sitting next to Erin from Doorstep Arts who had dropped her daughter off elsewhere beforehand and yet was one of the most engaged adults enjoying the show, laughing her face off and having a great time.

Doorstep Arts Studio group making some visual art #Listentome posters

Doorstep Youth Theatre performing their scratch 2.jpeg

Saturday involved a series of work presented through sketch performances. In addition to the work their youth had been developing, they also invited a series of artists from the community to showcase what they were working on. It was a good chance to hang out with all the youth from the various groups of Doorstep Arts one last time. The Doorstep Youth Theatre group presented their first public run through of their Protest and Rebellion piece, while some of the Doorstep Arts facilitators performed personal pieces they had been working on. We also had the opportunity to facilitate a short visual arts for social change workshop related to the activities of the weekend, inviting people to create #ListenToMe signs as well as mock up designs for a re-imagined world.

The evening wrapped up with a show called Standard Elite by Hidden Track Theatre. It was presented as an interactive theatre game that addressed status, privilege, discrimination and friendship, that encouraged participants to question and reflect on their own biases and oppressive actions. The audience was ushered into their seats following the roll of a die which dictated their ‘status, granting them seating in either the Standard or Elite seating areas. The performers treated the Elite as royalty and engaged with them throughout the show to vote on decisions that resulted in a choose-your-own adventure style of narrative. The Standard were periodically given the opportunity to compete for a position in the Elite seating area by performing on stage and completing mini-challenges. The story was left open with no presented solutions, leaving it up to the audience to discuss and reflect on the real-world parallels and how we can make change in our communities to reduce segregation, systematic discrimination and inherent societal biases.

Celebrating with mock-tails after a long and successful day

Wrapping it up one last time with the facilitators

Following the busy weekend, we had the chance to sit down for a good conversation with some for the Doorstep Arts facilitators and a couple of their youth to record a podcast. We then boarded our train back to London to commence on our journey back home.

Then, just like that, our time in England came to its conclusion. It has left us inspired by all the wonderful Art for Social Change work going on and has motivated us to find further ways to collaborate with our friends across the ocean. We collected lots of new activities and ideas to bring home and implement with our own groups and formed new worldly friendships and partnerships. And while the whole time the ever-evolving threat of the CoVid19 pandemic lingered in our minds, it was an experience we will never forget. We will be “unpacking” our learnings for months to come.

Antyx and Doorstep collaborating over zoom with performance

Follow-up:

It has now been a month and a half (at the time of writing this blog post) since we came home from England. Much has changed in that time as CoVid19 has now swept the globe. We made it home to Canada safely just as the government was starting to implement border closures before going into our mandatory 14-day self-isolation. Life has shifted significantly as we know it and our processes for engaging youth have been changing day by day. While we wrote many of these blog posts directly following the events of our trip, it took us a while to fine tune them and get them up as we were swept up into the chaos of attending to the basic needs and mental health of our own clients at home, while re-structuring all of our programming online. Communities are now expanding to global boundaries instead of National or Municipal ones. People are spending more time with their families, pets, homes and working on self-interest projects and development. Parents are learning how to be teachers and teachers are learning how to keep engagement up when youth are experiencing digital burnout with an overload of screen time. Artists all around the world are collaborating on new and inventive pieces brought into the digital realm, bringing so much beauty and joy to an otherwise horrifying situation.

In this time, we have learned, adapted and grown as facilitators and youth leaders. Moving to a digital platform for all our sessions, we have seen the world get smaller day by day as people are connected all over the globe in a common crisis. This has given us new opportunities for connection and collaboration between Antyx Community Arts and Doorstep Arts Youth as we have begun a regular bi-weekly digital sessions between the youth. So far, we have only had a few interactions, but the youth from both agencies are very excited to engage with this new collaboration. Although we have not yet defined a clear direction for this collaboration, there is much to anticipate in the potential of what these youth can create together.

A Trip Comes To A Close With A TorQuay Takeover - March 13-14