Provider Islington Youth Theatre and Company Three
Name Coronavirus Time Capsule
The Covid-19 pandemic has seen children and young people isolated from their social networks as up to half the world’s population has, at some point, been placed in lockdown, unable to physically meet up with friends.
For many young people, communicating through social media, video calling and mobile messaging services are second nature, but these are not always the best mediums for open and honest discussion about how they are feeling. To help young people put words to their feelings during these unprecedented times, members of youth theatre Company Three has created a project for young people across the world to post video diaries on a specially created platform to document their experiences in a Coronavirus Time Capsule.
Company Three is a group of 75 young people aged 12 to 19 that is led by a team of professional theatre-makers based in Islington, north London, which gives teenagers the space to tell their own stories and create their own change.
“We are doing it because we think it is essential that we continue to offer the teenagers we work with support, connection and a space to be creative,” the company states.
Company Three has written a blueprint setting out the parameters of the project, how young people can engage with it and what will then be done with the video diaries once they have been created. It is making the blueprint available free so that other youth theatres, educational institutions, student drama groups, amateur companies and community arts projects can use it to develop their own project to document the experiences of the young people they work with.
So far it has shared three weeks’ worth of videos made by young people in lockdown.
“We hope by all doing the project together we will better support our group members and ensure that teenagers are heard during this emergency,” states the company.
The time capsule is a cumulative project in that each week individual young people respond to a topic and make a 15-second video giving their view. These are then collated and edited together by a group leader. The same process happens every week, with new videos added to the original ones, so that the time capsule develops as the pandemic develops and evolves. Topics covered by Company Three so far include “boredom” and “home life”.
The company is publishing its time capsule every Friday, but says other groups could do this less frequently. Time capsules can be published publicly online or on private networks.
“We think people should listen to teenagers, so the more public videos, the better,” Company Three states. “Each group will make and distribute their own time capsule, but we hope to find a way to collect them all together in one place, as a way of marking and remembering this extraordinary period in our shared history.”
The project has been inspired by a new play the company has been producing called Everything, which is about a group of teenagers who create a time capsule live on stage as a response to global uncertainty and climate emergency that it hopes to perform later in the year – and which other youth theatres can develop their own versions of.
The blueprint sets out how to run the project and what equipment and skills are needed.
More from http://www.companythree.co.uk/
