Voice Arts Trust is nurturing a new relationship with Pablos Art Studio, where people who have had an experience of mental illness are supported to create their own visual art.  Later this year, Voice Arts will deliver a series of drama workshops, offering Pablos clients a new and very different creative experience and another medium for self expression.

Tenants in Wellington City Council Flats come from all corners of the world, all walks of life, and their stories reflect this wonderful diversity.  Voice Arts Trust is delighted to be partnering with City Housing to support a number of art and social projects engaging tenants and bringing their stories to the wider community.  We have completed the Te Ara Hou Storytelling and Mosaic Pilot Project and later this year begin work with tenant artists as they prepare for a public exhibition of their work.

Voice Arts Trust delivered a short series of story-telling workshops for tenants from Wellington City Council’s Te Ara Hou Flats. Our aim was to encourage and support participation in the creation of a mosaic that sought to reflect and honour the histories and futures of individual tenants, families and the collective.

The purpose of this project was to support four young people from the Maori and Somali community to develop skills in leadership and communication so they could step into the role of “audience host” for performances of the community theatre work “Crossing Lines.”

The four were mentored in the skills needed to support and encourage their community to reflect on the performance, to further engage with the dialogue presented and to genuinely respond to the work. Group workshops, held in the performance space, sought to develop the skills required, to build relationships between the group, to develop an understanding of the performance work and the questions being raised by the actors.

Phase One was free weekly drama classes for refugee youth which ran October 2010 – February 2011.   These classes were used to build capacity amongst the youth with the aim of nurturing a core group who would move on to phase two of the project.

Phase Two is the creation of an original performance work that will be presented to the wider Wellington community at the World Refugee Day carnival held every year.  At this point a number of theatre professionals will be invited to offer mentoring and support to the core group.

Phase Three will see the performance recorded and edited into a DVD which, with the script, will be circulated to schools and agencies nationwide in an effort to engage further debate around the refugee experience and foster greater understanding of refugee issues.

10 young people, identified by teachers and parents as needing additional support to build confidence and improve behaviour were selected for this project.  They met weekly with a theatre facilitator from Voice Arts Trust and introduced to a range of games and exercises designed to challenge and enjoy.  Workshops focused on building confidence and self-esteem amongst the participants while encouraging new forms of emotional expression and social engagement with other children.

This project offered a rare and unique opportunity for five young people with refugee backgrounds to be guided through the process of creating, developing and producing their own radio dramas for broadcast on Radio New Zealand National in celebration of World Refugee Day 2010.

The foundation of this project was individual workshops with a skilled arts-facilitator; the aim was to nurture new forms of self-expression and to support the creative exploration and development of each participant’s story of choice.  The result is five unique and very different stories exploring themes of loss, separation, re-birth, true love, and misunderstanding. The stories aired on Radio New Zealand National 21^st June – 25^th June 2010 and are now part of RNZ’s permanent on-line collection. This project was funded by The Department of Labour.

In 2008, the Museum of Wellington invited Voice Arts Trust to deliver a community based theatre project utilising the Museum space as a theatre. Following the success of this project, Voice Arts Trust has been once again invited to create a community based performance work, this time in support of an actual exhibition.

The exhibition “Death and Diversity” represents a partnership between the Museum of Wellington, the Office of Ethnic Affairs and Voice Arts Trust.  The exhibition along with the performance project will engage diverse ethnic groups in the Wellington region to explore the theme.

Participants aged 16-25 years, from at least four diverse ethnic communities and from the host community will come together to creatively explore the rituals and practices of death from a personal and cultural perspective.  They will be guided towards the creation of a performance piece that speaks to that exploration and also reflects the group’s diversity and the experience of sharing, learning and working together. The performance will be staged at the Museum of Wellington within the same space as the “Death and Diversity” exhibition driving interest in and supporting the work created by the ethnic communities involved

On location at Otaki Children’s Health Camp children learn new tools for expression and communication through drama and create their own performance for camp residents, staff and whanau.

In partnership with the Museum of Wellington, Wellington East Girls College and Village at the Park this cross generational project brought together teenagers and the elderly to explore the nature of memory.