NOT HOME: Workshop One
Inspired by Rent Party’s focus on both community and co-creation, “NOT HOME” is a poetic legacy project looking to explore our emotions and concerns around the UK’s housing crisis.
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Programme
NOT HOME
Rent Party Legacy Project: 2021Following on from their staging of “Rent Party”, Lyrici Arts and poet David Dykes are working together to build on some of the ideas explored by Darren Pritchard’s original production concept. Rent Party Medway (itself taking cues from the historical rent parties of 1920’s Harlem) dealt with ideas of community and storytelling, empowering cast members to create their own contributions to the Medway production. It is a show that believes that just as rent parties provided important substance during the Great Depression, the arts and its ability to strengthen camaraderie is crucial during 21st Century Austerity Britain.
Inspired by Rent Party’s focus on both community and co-creation, “NOT HOME” is a poetic project looking to explore our emotions and concerns around the UK’s housing crisis. The idea of “home” is so central to our beings, and for many the core to our identity, that trying to wrap our heads around it can worry and disturb it.
Believing that the only way that poetry would be able to create an adequate response to this complicated subject, the “NOT HOME” project aims to pull together as many different voices and experiences as possible to form a single piece that reflects our contemporary ideas around housing and home.
Project Details
This two-part workshop series introduces the idea of co-creative writing and how it can be used as a tool to explore difference and unexpected similarities. After taking part, participants will, as well as having created their own poems or other artistic responses, come away with a greater understanding of a co-creative process and their own feelings towards “home”.
Workshop One: September 11th, 6pm–8pm
In these virtual practice-based and exchange-led workshops we first explore the concept of choral voices and layering ideas and thoughts on a unified canvas, writing together using Google Docs to see how ideas feed and breed off each other. The core concept of the sessions is “home”: whatever that means to the participants, whatever shape that fills.
After this session, participants are encouraged to take away the work of the sessions to continue in solidarity or union. Between sessions feedback will be given to those who want it and would like to have more development of their ideas.
Workshop Two: September 25th, 6pm–8pm
In the second session we will continue with other co-creative prompts. Willing participants can present their work, discuss what they have learnt from the experience and what practices they can take forward in future works.
These can be multi-disciplined work for creatives of all backgrounds and experiences: works can be as brief or as long as the imagination needs and audio, video and visual elements can all be used.
Poetry contributions will form the basis of the final co-created poetry film, centred around the theme of Home and Housing and what this means for newer generations who are struggling to have housing ownership.
DaVID DYKES
David Dykes is a practicing poet and spoken word artist. He has been living in Medway and performing across Kent and the UK since 2016. He has published two chapbooks with his first collection forthcoming.
David, with his partner, has been producing spoken word nights in Medway with their night Big Trouble and believes in supporting a wide range of poets and poetry styles and giving artists the space to develop their individual practice.
Supported By
Not Home sessions
NOT HOME: Workshop Two
Inspired by Rent Party’s focus on both community and co-creation, “NOT HOME” is a poetic legacy project looking to explore our emotions and concerns around the UK’s housing crisis.
