Building community through the arts

By Sally Stenning, Head of Performing Arts

“Above all, helping a new world to be born requires creativity, the ability to generate something fresh, which entails the innate capacity face a problem, to see possibility arising from the broken scraps of the old answers, and to actualize it. In a world morphing at light speed into something none of us can foretell, fear and loss can be paralyzing. Creativity is the antidote: it is both our greatest challenge and our greatest need.”
Arlene Goldbard

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists and the Future

The Arts has always been a platform for building community. This semester the Arts Departments are excited to be working on a number of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary projects, to bring together members of our own Radford community and those from further afield to work in partnership exploring a range of social justice themes and issues.

Cre8
Cre8 is a project implemented last year to give students opportunities to engage in the Arts in an interdisciplinary way using Project-Based Learning to generate work in response to a common theme. The focus of Cre8 is to foster real-life skills such as creative thinking, communication, goal setting and organisation, resilience and risk-taking as students generate their projects in collaboration with others.

This year we will be partnering with our Director of Service Learning, Mr Scott Corbett, to facilitate a range of projects working in collaboration with community groups to learn about the value of working alongside those from different backgrounds, to enrich the knowledge and understanding of others. We are looking forward to working with our Year 8s on these projects with the aim of showcasing some of their work with and for Radford College and the broader community.

Year 9 inter-disciplinary devised theatre project
The Year 9 Drama class has been busy this semester working on an adaptation of the much- loved children’s classic, ‘Wilfred Gordon MacDonald Partridge’. Whilst on the surface a simple story about a little boy who lives next door to an aged-care home, it also explores deeper themes around loss of memory, ageing and the importance of cross-generational relationships.

Year 9 have been exploring the story and its wider themes through collaboration with Visual Arts students in the form of bunraku puppet-making and manipulation workshops led by guest artist Ruth Pieloor. They also participated in combined workshops with Kindergarten to explore characters and gather interviews about a five year old’s perspective on aging and memory.

Later this term they will be working with aged-care residents, gathering further interviews to inform their research into and interpretation of the story’s broader themes. The production will be presented in Term 4 and will integrate music, dance, puppetry, song and projections.

Y9 students working with Kindy kids
Y9 students working with Kindy kids

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