Oral Histories

I particularly had my eye on Polka as I was keen on working with children specifically. So I did a placement there for, I think it was about eight weeks perhaps, and now my role is Community Engagement Manager. Essentially it’s the outreach arm of the Creative Learning department and it’s all about finding groups and communities who might not ordinarily come to Polka. It was originally set up to recognize the fact the east and the west in the borough are quite different in terms of who knows about Polka and who comes to Polka,so the west of the borough being that bit more affluent, more for the core kind of Polka audience and the east of the borough not necessarily coming to Polka,perhaps for financial reasons, perhaps just not thinking it’s their world or that it’s for them so the project’s all about engaging with those communitiesthat aren’t coming already so it was, it’s a series of projects, funded tickets, workshops that reflect what’s going on at Polka but happen in the communityso in library settings perhaps is one example.  There’s been a lot of work in children’s centres working with really young onesfrom perhaps 8 months to 36 months, erm, and that’s really good because we’re starting to get parents and their child engaged with Polka at a really early stageand to start to think about the fact that Polka can be for them. It is a space to play as well, so I kind of think about the three stems of my work being projects,ticket allocation and promoting Polka as a place to play. There was a period of time where I was setting up the BSL interpreted performances that would involve sending the script to the interpreter, making sure they could see the show and promoting the show to particular groups that might come so there was that strand of work,there was also booking in workshops for schools, there was the after school workshops, there was, so assisting with them,assisting with the registers of them, I feel like I’ve done kind of almost all aspects of the creative learning department during the time that I’ve been there,but I would say that I particularly feel like the line through to then being now Community Engagement Manager  stems definitely from experiencesthat I had when I was Education Officer, because I really enjoyed working on a couple of projects that were particularly family learning projects sothat feels like it neatly threaded through to being Community Engagement Manager. There was a couple of projects that I really liked but there was one where we were working with storytellers and one storyteller would workwith the children and the other storyteller was working with the parents and the children created a short scene together and then the parents went awaywith the storyteller and looked at poems and I remember that they had particularly the theme of colour and then after a bit of exercisesand development they all wrote their own poem specifically about their colour, the colour that represented them, then the children presented their short sceneto the parents and the parents read out their poems and it was really moving because, just you could see the wonder in the faces of the children as they saw their parents in such a different way - having probably just an hour or so before been rushing out the door and “get your shoes on, we’ve got to run,we’ve got to get to school!” And because it happened at 9.30 in the morning, they had about an hour of the session and it was just really lovely. And the same thing with another project that was called “The Games I Play” and it was about playground games and it was about parents and grandparents,actually sharing with the children playground games and, then again, the recognition of that game still being played today and seeing their parent and theirgrandparents in a really different way. So I saw the kind of power of drama and how transformative it can be in that kind of family community setting So although we were all in a school environment it was more along the lines of some of the community workshops that we do now. I kind of feel really proud of the Re:Sound Choir, the intergenerational choir which is our most recent project, community project, for really similar reasons Because lots of people were connecting with Polka that ordinarily wouldn’t.There were quite a few older people who’d never been to Polka before, didn’t have children or grandchildren but came for the joy of singingand then through that formed friendships with children and families and that was really moving to see over the weeks that they wanted to keep in touch. Over the course of all the projects I think we had more than, I think it was about 96 that engaged at one point and from the ages of 6 months through to 96,you could definitely say it was truly intergenerational. It was a really good mix, people really appreciated when it was the performance day all gathering together and realising they were part of a bigger entity that all four choirs could get together and it was really social and really nice. There was one image that will always stay in my  head of one rehearsal with the mum soothing her child walking up and down in the church hall as he was trying to get off to sleep and she had the hood down and then she had her score on the hood and she was singing as she walked and it was great, I just thought, you know this is making you feel really comfortable place for you to be.So I think that’s been really strong, the idea that Polka can be a place that’s special for a 3 year old or an 83 year old. Often you witness groups where they come into Polka for the very first time. And that is of course what is very much the intention of the community, of the department, so you do often see that kind of face, that wonder. And it does make me think actually back again to another responsibility I had asEducation Officer, which was for the “Curtain up” programme to promote and invite schools to come that ordinarily wouldn’t be able to afford to cometo Polka. I used to invite schools to come onto that programme and I would always welcome them and see them on the actual “Curtain up” performanceday; and again you would just see the excitement!  The actors talk about it as well, now that it’s a very different audience when that audience is in the theatre, because they’re just much fresher to it all, they’re not inhibited by how they think they should behave in the theatreand so they will kind of call out and react to things that are happening on stage and it’s really real. The idea of it moving them and moving me and making some kind of a change is probably, yeah, a real guiding force for me I’d say. I’ve seen families that come through Children’s Centre projects that have then gone on to do workshops in libraries and there was one family who did a projectat a Children’s Centre called “Stories with dad” at that time it was stories with dad and then the child is now seven or so I think, and he was one of the singers in the Re:Sound project. So seeing these people again and again engaging with Polka over the years is really satisfying because you just think, ‘well yes you’ve got it, you’ve kind of got that bug, you feel like it is for you and you want to keep on engaging with it so that’s really good.’ We’re going to have a new creative learning studio space, which is going to be used when the building reopens.There’s various times in the week which are allocated to community and that’ll be either community groups that can come and use the spacefor their own activity or a session that we are going to programme that will be reflecting some of the paid-for sessions. I think the vision really is that it will be used by a broad range of people and that they’ll come and enjoy shows and families can feel at home there. That step to going then to Polka, to somewhere that’s unknown and new and unfamiliar and not in their immediate neighbourhood, sometimes does seem like quite a challenging one for some families; so my vision is about how to find those ways to build those bridges, lots of community fun days and family learning days, lots of things happening out in the community as well reflecting what we’re doing at Polka. And the one other area I suppose is that more people will feel that they can access the participation activities happening at Polka - the holiday workshops, the after school workshops, the summer schools - because again, that’s about feeling a part of Polka, but also feeling a part of the whole kind of performanceworld, from the early years of doing all the creative play and imaginative play but extending that further and helping them to develop their acting skills. It will be great to see the children performing on stage more, on our stage more.And I think that is part of the thinking, and part of Pete’s plan is to have more community involvement and more intergenerational involvementand very visibly present so, the choir yes,but then also productions in the future, hopefully.