A new short film and a new collaboration: celebrate both with us next week!
February has been a whirlwind! We have plenty of things to show you soon, but this post will focus on an announcement of a project that will make up a big chunk of our work this year - and a programme launch at which you will get to see the fruits of our most recent survivor community co-creation.
We couldn't be happier to tell you that our founder Nell Hardy has been brought in as this year’s Creative Producer for Old Diorama Arts Centre's One Roof. Following the third annual iteration of the two-week January festival last month, One Roof is about to start its first ever year-round programme, with weekly sessions in visual and performance arts for artists with lived experience of homelessness.
This year of the project has been titled ‘Laying Foundations’, as the work done and learning from this year will determine the direction of the programme and identity of the festival for the years to come. We know that trauma consciousness has to be built solidly into a programme’s principles to be effective, and that is best done by embedding them right from the beginning. Old Diorama Arts Centre has been and continues to be one of RAT’s most committed supporters, so it gives us immense pride to be able to collaborate with them on setting trauma consciousness into this thrilling expansion of their arts and homelessness work.
It feels fitting for us to dedicate a chunk of our efforts to the homelessness-experienced community at this stage: starting our core group open access meetings last year has brought us into contact with a huge range of survivors from many walks of life and myriad different experiences represented, yet still an embodied understanding of the nature of homelessness seems to be the most common denominator. Whether post-traumatic stress has arisen from lack of safety in one’s physical surroundings, lack of safety in one’s own body or lack of safety in one’s own mind, the resulting senses of rootlessness and precarity directly to the essence of homelessness. Our communities overlap considerably, and belong together.
As our regular readers are probably well aware by now, we cannot overstress that trauma-consciousness is not just about treating survivors delicately, and it certainly isn't about avoiding difficult subjects. Above all, it’s about agency: giving survivors a platform to express what we want and need to express, and sharing power to enable us to affect the change we are best placed to affect. So in bringing us in to help establish their trauma-conscious culture, they know we won’t be insisting everything be coated in a thick layer of sherbet! But at the same time, we won’t be demanding that the artists all tackle difficult subjects, either. For those of us who have experienced homelessness, making any art is an act of resistance to the social exclusion we have encountered - whether we use art to address specific social issues, or to share our perception of beauty, or just to have a good laugh. If any of our artists want to change the world in any very specific ways, we’ll do our best to help them do it - but all of them will know that they are already changing the world by taking the creative space they deserve, and using it how they want to use it.
True to this ethos, we will be kicking off the programme by running a six-week course using theatre-based play to explore what drives us to make art: for whom, with whom, to mine what questions about the world around us? We aim for this to set participants up to meet the rest of the programme with an active curiosity about and ambition for themselves and each other. Our course will sit alongside a course in animation techniques, and start on Friday 14th March: info on how to sign up for both will be available soon, so keep checking our socials and newsletter.
What better way to introduce this course, this programme and this collaboration, than to premiere RAT’s latest film: co-created by a mixture of participants recruited through RAT and those recruited through One Roof? Based on an original concept by Bahja Mahamed, a RAT core group participant whom we first met through the One Roof festival, the film explores the nature of coercive control, the concept of ‘refuge’, and the process of reaching freedom. We will be screening Anew for the first time at the programme launch event at Old Diorama Arts Centre at 5pm on Friday 7th March, followed by an evening of chat and karaoke! It is free to attend and all are welcome; if you can’t make it, the film will be available to watch through our website and on YouTube from the next day.
RAT has always believed passionately that collaboration and co-creation are the keys to meaningful art and a trauma-conscious society. We’re rearing to see where this one takes us.
One Roof is possible due to funding from The Linbury Trust, Arts Council England National Lottery Good Causes, The Tedworth Charitable Trust and ODAC's other generous donors.
Anew was possible due to funding from CLICK Arts Foundation and support from ODAC.
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