SubArtSpace - Introduction

The past couple of weeks have been very exciting for me - a project I was invited to work on in early Spring is finally taking shape! The project’s called SubArtSpace and it’s a collaboration between the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council’s In The Mind’s Eye, high school staff and students at KCI and the theatre company MT Space. They received a Safer and Vital Communities grant through the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services to create a theatre-based art event with youth who have experiences with substance use (e.g. drugs, alcohol) either personally or with their family. Theatre was chosen as a creative outlet to allow youth to explore challenging and personal issues like substance use and addictions in a way that is fun and easily accessible to the community.   

So I spent time in May to August meeting with community members and organizations trying to find some youth who were interested in art and wanted to commit to the practices, and that’s exactly what I found.

So far, we’ve had 2 practices during which Gary Kirkham (from the MT Space) guides a group of around 8 youth through activities that get our creativity wheels turning. The youth come to practices with new ideas and ask (demand?) that we meet more often. Once a week is not enough! When I shared my excitement and relayed the youths’ excitement to Juanita (from Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council) she recommended I document this process through a series of short reflections to help keep our community in the loop and to help reflect on the process. I hope this first one will provide some background information and a bit of an idea of what to expect.

A couple of things I did NOT know before practices began:

1.      That I would be participating as well!! So much for a comfort zone, Gary has the youth as well as myself pushing ourselves to “be” in ways we may not normally be in front of an audience
2.     What a creative process really is. I anticipated brainstorming sessions and new perspectives or methods of presenting our experiences but what this is becoming is a very raw, primal expression of our first instincts. I feel like I’m learning more about human behaviour through this process than I did in some of my psychology classes
3.    That youth would request more structure. As mentioned, our creative process is very fluid and it was very interesting for me to watch the youth request timelines, boundaries and then learn to navigate this type of relationship. 

I know I’ll have more to share with you, but for now you’ll have to hold tight until the next practice.