Summer Project

Every year we run something called Summer Project.

Summer Project is a simple idea, but like all simple things, it’s actually really complex.

It’s simple because it’s a week, in a big space with lots of rooms (this year the Pleasance Theatre in Holloway), with as many of our members as want to come (normally about 25) and some professional adult artists.

It’s simple because we enter with the week with no plan. There’s no pressure to share anything at the end; we don’t invite any audiences or outsiders. We start by talking to each other and we follow whatever we find in those conversations.

This year on the first day we played a game called ‘if you really knew me’. Everyone wrote or spoke about the things you’d know, if you really knew them.

If you really knew me you’d know I’m scared of heights .

That I have a birthmark in the shape of the United Kingdom .

That I’m really interested in my Grandparents who were sent to concentration camps in the Holocaust

That I’m obsessed with the mafia

That I want to know more about the butterfly effect.

We take the list of things that we should know about each other and turn them quickly into duologues. Jack and Cherie lie holding hands looking up at the sky. Alle and Love hide under a duvet and speak as if we aren’t all around them listening.

We have two members of staff documenting everything – writing down what we’re doing and filming the scenes we make.

By the end of the day we’ve asked one simple question and suddenly everything is complex. The room is full of ideas, debates, discoveries and starting points.

Francois Mattarasso says: “In order to really listen you have to not know what the outcome is”. Summer Project embraces this entirely. One of the first things I say to the group is that it doesn’t matter what we make this week, or if we make nothing. If we all decide to play hide and seek all week, then that’s the right thing to do.

For the rest of the week I co-ordinate everyone in exploring the things that they feel are most important in more depth. I send little groups of people away to talk about and create work inspired by the subjects that have come up on day one.

Cudjoe Odoi-Asare takes a small group to explore what it means to get out of your comfort zone, to leave your city.

The writer Sonia Jalaly looks at anger with four 14 year olds. They end up recreating scenes from Mafia movies.

Eight young women spend a couple of hours listing all the chat up lines they can think of. We build dens out of cardboard boxes, blankets, lengths of tarpaulin and bamboo canes.

Every day we invite a special guest to come and teach us something.

Gail Babb comes in and talks about the New Cross House fire in 1981. Mezze Kalunga-Eade encourages us to use movement to replace platitudes – the meaningless phrases we hear every day. It is what it is, there are plenty more fish in the sea, the future’s what you make it.

The musician and composer Aiwan Obinyan gets us to all write a song collectively. It starts with some lyrics and then layer by layer we add voices, instruments, beats. 25 people write a whole song in an hour.

Every time we make something, we share it back to the group and talk about it together. We have discussions about layering, about using a single difficult question to define the piece you’re trying to make. We talk about what makes someone a theatre-maker.

On Wednesday we all have Caribbean food together, sitting in the theatre foyer.

On Thursday a professor of mathematics visits us to talk about the butterfly effect. That night we work late and have an open mic night where everyone shares a personal piece that reflects what they’ve been interested in during the week.

Izzy makes an audio piece about her cousin who has Downs Syndrome.

Kezia recreates an interview with her Grandmother.

Kadiesat writes and sings her song. We’ve never seen her do that before.

Konrad delivers a comedy monologue about his family from inside a massive box.

The further through the week we go, the more agency we give the young people, and the more they take.

On the Friday we try and tie up a few of the hundreds of loose ends we’ve created. The chat up lines become a dance routine. The work on anger has become a recreation of a Dragon Ball Z scene. The ‘if you really knew me conversations’ turn into a piece in which Cherie and Jack write down all the things they like about each other and read them out until a timer goes and they destroy all the unread ones.

By the end there is a feeling of having regenerated. We have created a stock of things that will inform everything we do next. There are new starting points ready to be investigated: feeling angry, making predictions, our great-grandparents, composing music, intimate conversations.

I think back to past summer projects and all the things we’ve discovered in them. The unexpected piece two boys made about periods after overhearing a girls-only conversation, a two day investigation into chicken shops, working with a real life hypnotist because Bailey said he was obsessed with hypnotism.

In each of these weeks the discoveries have come because we haven’t planned. It’s scary and requires real trust, but it also creates a space in which listening isn’t just important, it’s essential. The more I work, the more I think that listening is the most important thing I do as an artist.

In a few weeks we’ll come back to our regular Monday night workshops and we will start to create new pieces of work. The starting points for these will come from a week-long conversation between 25 people. A conversation which involved eating together, playing games, discovering more about each other, shouting about the things we find most important, learning new things.

And – most importantly – listening.