Tikhtak

Greenbelt 08

This year at Greenbelt the CMS youth team juggled between 3D, trax16 and Tajik break dancers. Each day we ran 3D workshops with around 40-50 young people. 3D stands for Drama, Dance and Drumming and using this medium we explored both man's and God's perspective on looking after the environment and encouraged people to engage with A Rocha. As always we got interviews with various people from around Greenbelt  ranging from Martyn Joseph and Comedian Jo Enright to authors Richard Burridge who has  just written "Imitating Jesus" and Philip Yancey. It was also good to catch young people just milling around the site and working in here with various organisations. Again the Tajik breakdancers Vito and Illios were doing their stuff, sharing testimonies and the Youth team compared their programme. Neema crafts from Tanzania in the CMS tent were an inspiration to everyone and engaged people in making paper out of elephant dung, jewelry out of glass and dancing. I think outside of the CMS programme my highlight was chilling with Irfana in the big venue Centaur listening to Aradhna, a white, traditional Indian band, while Zara danced and ran around the wide carpeted expanse. Check out flickr for more pics

Soul Survivor 08

Another year at Soul Survivor slightly left me with a "Ground Hog" feeling this year. I joined a CMS team and used the CMS stall as a launch pad to get interviews for trax16. It was incredibly wet too just to add to the drama. I have to say that Soul Survivor did have more of an urban influence to it than normal with hip hop beats and blasting out from the underground venue and more of an ethnic mix than normal with groups from other countries from Malta and Czech to South Korea, Do listen to trax16 to get a flavour of the week. Also check out some pics on flickr of my travels around the sight as well with the help of Ruth's camera work, which was to be created into a talking heads short film. Not sure if that happened?

MA placement ast LIFT

As part of my Applied Drama MA at Goldsmiths I am doing a placement at LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre). LIFT have spent the last two decades bringing theatre from different parts of the world to London. They have an archive of all this experience which will conveniently be based at Goldsmiths college and part of my remit is to develop user friendly ways into accessing it and inspiring other user groups to access it too. This will culminate in designing workshops to take into schools, colleges etc LIFT have been committed to staging theatre in very unlikely venues and their philosophy is pretty much summed up by Phakarna, an arts exchange programme from South Africa "Everyone irrespective of age, experience or culture, has equally something to give and gain from each other." I am hoping this placement will also influence my work among young people. Check out my pics of Sultans elephant which came to London a few years ago as part of LIFTS 06 festival.