Lockdown Compositions & Crafted Conversations

LOCKDOWN COMPOSITIONS

At Collage Arts, young people and music are very close to our heart! Many of you will already know of the work we do with young people through Collage Voices and Collage Works. We are delighted that through Collage Community project, Creative Futures, we designed a musical strand to support 5 women of colour taking part in Tomorrow’s Warriors (youth charity) to create new original compositions based on their experiences of lockdown. They wrote about their experiences, gained expert mentoring from Cassie Kinoshi (SEED ensemble) to develop these into compositions. Amazingly, two of the women, Mia Runham and Amy Gadiaga, put their bands together with young musicians from Tomorrow’s Warriors in time to premiere their music online at the EFG London Jazz Festival 2020 in our venue, Karamel, last week on 19 November, and have had over 750 audience views and positive comments.

Mia Runham septet – Lockdown composition by Mia Runham

Amy Gadiaga quartet – Lockdown composition by Amy Gadiaga

CRAFTED CONVERSATIONS

Similarly, Collage Arts have been supporting 28 young people of colour through Crafted Conversations 1 and 2 at KORI (youth charity), activities that have also formed part of the Collage Community project support on Creative Futures. 21 women took part in the first phase, with their thoughts and views transformed into an audio-visual piece with 3 striking pieces of lockdown art, and an e-book of their learning from lockdown experiences and their hopes for the future. During the second phase, we built on this work and a further 7 women joined up. All took part in workshops and mentoring sessions to build their financial stability, strengthen their wellbeing to manage anxiety levels, and build better networks to improve employment opportunities. Download a copy of the Crafted Conversations e-book

From Monday, Lockdown Art goes on display in the empty windows of Karamel (on Coburg Road N22) and Artspace 4 (in Wood Green’s Library Mall), so keep a look out for vibrant and insightful artwork that has been informed by diverse responses to London’s Covid-19 Lockdown and the Black Lives Matter movement.  

The Collage Arts Community projects have developed partnerships with similar-minded Black-led community organisations, like Tomorrow’s Warriors and KORI. Organisations like ours that work creatively with young people to empower them and develop their skills and resilience, which in turn improves their futures. These are not short term interventions, but long term relationships with young people that last within the community and beyond individual funded projects.

Check out some of our recent projects: The Lockdown Monologues – Lucky / Can’t be what you can’t see