Our Listen 52 project is a youth leadership and arts engagement project in Sheffield, culminating in a city centre performance in July 2022. Local Young Producer Interns worked with professional Artists and the Chol team to discover young people’s hopes and fears about what their world will be like, thirty years from now. As part of Listen 52, we ran a number of mini creative residencies to create art and inspire our final production in July.
What do our mini residencies look like?
Residency 1 – Film
This residency was based around film production. Our Young Producer Interns worked at The Montgomery Theatre in Sheffield, working alongside Site Gallery. Each young producer was assigned a role in supporting and producing a dystopian film, themed around loneliness, survival, trust, hope and fear. The creation of the film provided insight and development of film-making skills for the young producers. The film Survivors is now available to watch online.
Residency 2 – Mental Health Awareness
This was an exploration of mental health in young people, looking at young people’s hopes, fears, frustrations and ideas, and gathering responses as to how young people feel right now about current and future issues. It fed into the wider themes of Listen 52, while teaching important skills such as research and promotion of empathy, culminating in an art audio installation piece for people to engage with art/portraits and hear thoughts and feelings in 2052. To help us gather responses, we asked the public to fill in an anonymous short survey.
Residency 3 – Days of Future Past Podcast
With each episode focusing on a different theme, such as climate crisis, identity, class and education, our hosts Alfie & Mani responded to questions, comments and provocations from young people across Sheffield and give their own unique perspectives on current events impacting today’s youth. They also explored what issues they think will affect young people in 2052 and what we can do today to prevent these.
Residency 4 – Theatre
The Young Producers co-created a theatre piece to perform at the Walkley Festival on Saturday 25 June.
All of these mini residencies helped us in the gathering of stories and engaging young performers, which in turn built momentum for the final Listen 52 show, which took place in the the last weekend of July.
If you would like to find out more about these mini residencies or the Listen 52 project, please contact info@wearechol.co.uk.
