YOUTH COMMUNITY WORK

We want to create specialized cultural mediation workshops for students age 5 to 8 at École Ludger-Duvernay, an under-resourced school in the Saint-Henri area. We want to bring two young apprentices, recently trained through the Mentor’art program, into our creation process. The teens in this program are grappling with issues surrounding dropping out of school. 

The process 

We are currently working to create a youth play called Éva et Porée. We will provide cultural mediation workshops to accompany our work in under-resourced primary schools, where access to art is limited due to a lack of resources. The stage of the work for which we’re applying for the TEC bursary is split into two parts; community engagement will be at the heart of our artistic process. 

FIRST PART: Mediation 

In collaboration with École Ludger-Duvernay, we want to design, develop and lead cultural mediation workshops with classes and teachers. We will give six workshops in two primary-school classrooms (first and second grade). Our encounters with these children will greatly influence the next steps of our creation and our rapport with audiences. We are very pleased about this upcoming collaboration with École Ludger-Duvernay, because we are very affected by the striking inequalities within the public school system. So it was crucial for us to provide our workshops in an under-resourced school where the children have less access to art than in more privileged schools. 

Since we also come from a remote area that doesn’t value culture and from an underprivileged area, we know from experience that art needs to seek out its audience and that awareness-raising is all the more effective when it reaches people at a young age. This is what happened to us, Esther Duplessis (Interprétation, 2020) and myself, Alice Tixidre (Écriture dramatique, 2021), and we made art not only our careers, but our reason to get up in the morning. 

SECOND PART: Participation of two apprentices in creating the play 

In December 2023, we will undertake a one-week research and creation residency at the performance hall at Patro Villeray and two weeks at the Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles. We want to bring two teenage interns with us. With training through the Mentor’art organization under their belts, these interns will accompany the members of the creation team. Their technical skills and abilities will be valued and may be put to use in service by our technical, creation and stage directors. We are planning to pay them the same hourly rate as we receive.

These residencies will make it possible for us to create our production. We will design the play with a touring context in mind. The interns will learn the various constraints of this specific context. For example, the various design elements will need to be able to adapt to the range of spaces in which we’ll be performing.