Belgrade Youth get creative with confronting lockdown loneliness
Following his first blog introducing our Telling Stories on (the Small) Screen project last week, Senior Youth Theatre member Cameron returns to tell us more about the ideas that his group have been exploring in their Zoom-based sessions.
In our latest session we have been working on the subject of loneliness, partly in response to a question posed by one of our group members last week. The question, “Can lockdown break you?” really interested all of us. It’s so relevant to everyone right now and builds on the themes of mental health and anxiety that we’ve explored in previous sessions. It feels like a perfect opportunity to raise awareness about mental health issues, and I’m curious to see where it will take us.
It’s interesting that, while we’re exploring themes of isolation, in this week’s session we’ve been collaborating and working together as a group more than ever. Last week I wrote about how I felt that we needed to look at ways of working outside of our individual boxes and sync our work together. This week, we’ve been brainstorming different ways of doing this and have started working on a curtain-raiser for our final project.
It was really exciting seeing everyone starting to work together as one. Up until this point, we’ve had lots of small, separate pieces and ideas coming through, showing different people’s individual talents. This week, we started to bring those together, resulting in one combined piece of work that reflected everyone’s ideas and personalities. It was wonderful to see everyone working in harmony in this way.
I also think that the structure of the sessions is changing and getting better. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what is different but I do feel like we’re making progress and spending our time better as we become more focused on the final piece.
I still feel that the sessions seem to go by very quickly – perhaps because I’m used to the much longer, in-person sessions we’d normally have at the Belgrade, but I think I am beginning to get used to the idea of this as a separate, distinct project, rather than a direct replacement for our normal sessions.
I am hoping that next week we can continue in the same vein, combining our talents and working together to create something really spectacular!
