Hugo was a researcher and writer for CuriousWorks throughout the first half of 2008. He has written a number of articles and stories about CuriousWorks that we’ll feature on the website over the coming months. Up first is an article that breaks down one of the key programs at CuriousWorks: All Around You.
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ALL AROUND YOU
All Around You is a travelling arts lab. It involves systems of both learning and teaching that encourage and promote community expression through collaboration, through cross-pollination and through a curious embrace of the many diverse media now readily available to all at minimal cost.
All Around You is a program developed over three years within specific communities. It is aimed at moving toward a point where the arts are readily blended with everyday life in communities by harnessing existing resources.
Such goals are to be achieved in three stages:
SITE VISIT ONE
A small group of CuriousWorks tutors, whose skills range across the board from traditional theatre training to film editing to new digital media, collaborate in a lab environment with a large group of interested young people on their terms: what they learn and what is taught is responsive to the stories they and their communities want to tell. Once their skill levels are sufficient, the training melds into a creation of new works, culminating in a small showing involving an informal local community forum.
SITE VISIT TWO
By this point, one of the engaged, interested young people from each lab will have been chosen and trained in a multi-faceted, intensive period of incubation, now returning to their particular lab as a paid staff member of CuriousWorks to co-direct a major work with and for their community: it will be developed by a smaller group of dedicated young locals and will involve the media interesting them the most. This could take the form of an interactive video installation, a fully-fledged computer game, an album or a dance show worthy of touring.
SITE VISIT THREE
The third year: the young person, who has been working in collaboration with CuriousWorks for a year now, essentially begins to take over our role. They devise and develop new creative works that encourage discussions and forums of issues important to their community. To do so, they utilise systems that CuriousWorks has set up with them, whether in the form of resources of local partners (for example, having access to high-end computers at a local migrant resource centre) or a mobile media kit left with the community. Our goal in each region is redundancy of our own role; once this is achieved, we move on.
The works created will be site-specific, occurring outside the conventional spaces where we are told ‘theatre’ should be, involving a multitude of forms, from traditional dance to projected online gaming, from music made on mobile phones to interactive, immersive environments in the forms of abstract maps and otherwise.
They will not only stay in the communities in which they were produced: they will have the opportunity to tour and they will become a major focus of CuriousWorks’ online project, All Around You dot net— an immersive mapping system and social networking site. Here you or I can both view and become part of an online map of the Asia-Pacific region, zoom in on or walk around Miller Technology High School, where the first lab occurred, and view the diverse works created there in collaboration with CuriousWorks.
All Around You embraces the concept that we do not have to be passive recipients of the media all around us. We now possess the faculties to alter and to create, to encourage and to collaborate in such a manner that allows us to tell our tales to the other side of the globe, all around the world, all around you.
[...] Guest Post by Hugo Bowne-Anderson: Feature Article on ‘All Around You’ [...]