It was the absolute best time to spend with these incredible people.
It was an absolute privilege to spend time with everyone up at Wesley Rata in Naenae.
We got to work in this glorious space called “The Grand”. Formerly a rest home and now our creative space for a couple of hours a week for ten weeks and we made the most of it. Such an enriching time to spend together to explore this idea of stories, community and what it means to be together.
Each week I invited participants to explore the areas between acting and music and storytelling to explore all aspects of Playback Theatre. I facilitated and guided this experience, we also spent time together socialising over cups of tea and biscuits and deepening our relationships. This was a very important part of the work, taking time to debrief and explore deeper themes of the stories and things we had heard during the session.
Our participants were full of life experience as well as new to life experience. This gave us a wonderful spectrum to explore, and we were able to meet a few generations of one family. This brought much joy to our community.
To celebrate, support and connect how our stories interweave.
Each week we explored different subjects/themes to enjoy and deep dive into each other's experiences, sometimes this was led by Claire and other times led by the participants.
Our theme work:
Introduction to Playback Theatre
Kings or Queens
Mothers
Trials and Triumphs
Holding On
It's a Noisy World
The Places We Choose to Be
Eye-opening moments
Our group was always so generous welcoming and warm that it was so graceful to have a baby and mother present with us during our creative play.
Music with so beautifully held by different members of the group. It fully supported the enactments of each of the stories.
I came away feeling very privileged to have met each of these amazing people to have been supported and to be held by them in my teaching and to have had this amazing space at Wesley Rata for us to play and create in.
Some projects illustrate how we can come together as a culture to seek understanding and grow connections as a community.
I am very grateful to Emily and Jos at Wesley Rata, the participants and our beautiful space.
Now our space is no longer, it is being reshaped into apartments. We were amongst the last of the larger creative projects to hold space and leave creative energy here in The Grand.