Being a Young Artist with Chol

A Blog by Kerry Lindeque, Chol’s Young Artist.

I became a Young Artist in an unconventional way. In the past, my interest in arts and theatre has been as a casual spectator and I never really considered myself a creative person. My passions had always lay with politics and feminism. That was how I got my part-time job with Chula, a phenomenal gender equality charity, to be an assistant on Angry Girls, their joint project with Chol Theatre, which brought together feminism and arts to create a collective of young people and artists. When Chula had to close I thought that was the end of Angry Girls and my journey into the arts. I was wrong! The team at Chol worked very hard to keep the project alive and employed me as a Young Artist. So, despite never having identified with the word ‘artist’, here I was, working for a theatre company.

I was joined by a cohort of other Young Artists and Young Producers, from theatre practitioners to classical musicians, and we became the Angry Girls collective. It was our aim, through workshops, creative exploration, and outreach work, to create a theatre piece about gender inequality, feminism, rage, and hope. Each person’s skills, passions, and desired development was taken into account when role and responsibilities were assigned. For example, I lead on our marketing, supervised by a permanent Chol member, and responsible for several Young Producers, who worked with me to promote our show through social media content, flyering, and email marketing. I also worked on our outreach, building connections with community groups, organising, and facilitating workshops with young people. I also got to try new things that I never thought I would be able to do. Running around the Crucible Rehearsal Room, testing new ideas for the show, working out staging, helping with monologues, discussing costumes and props, even making a short film! I never imagined myself co-creating a theatre performance – worse, I didn’t think I was capable of it – but as a Young Artist I was able to. 

That leads me to perhaps the best part of being a Young Artist: the people. Working with the other Young Artists and Young Producers was a dream. Each person brought a slightly different skill or perspective to the project and, through kindness, honesty, trust, and laughter, we built a community. It was so lovely to know that, once a week, I could go hang out with a group of young women and people of marginalised genders, share our experiences, and create amazing art out of it. I learned so much from all of them. The Chol team were also brilliant, supporting us in any way they could and organising workshops to inform our show, with dynamic creative people, from Eleanor May Blackburn to Riham Isaac. 

And then came the final show! My first ever show week proved to be as exciting and stressful as promised, all of us working together in a mad rush to finalise staging, memorise lines, sell out tickets, and put the show together. Having not acted since those bygone days of school plays, I was so nervous, not least when my glasses broke 10 minutes before getting on stage! But it all came together in the end: two sold out shows of Speak Rage Soar, bursting at the seams with anger, hope, sisterhood, poetry, singing, animation, and more. It was a magical night.

Once the ribbons and rose petals had settled from the show, my Young Artist journey still wasn’t over. That’s part of what makes Chol a truly collaborative theatre company: so many of the Young Artists, including myself, are still involved in various Chol projects, from acting in their latest show, Daughters of the Coal, to assisting on their marketing. It’s like the old saying about the mafia, ‘once you’re in, there’s no getting out’ (but much less deadly and much more fun!).