Children make great art. Like anyone working on getting young people involved in and inspired by the arts, this is the principle that drives us at Trinity Laban. Sometimes, the right set of circumstances, resourcing, and artistic alchemy combine at just the right time to enable wonderful things to happen, as with Hope 4 Justice – a large-scale music and dance performance featuring hundreds of young participants from Lewisham.
Returning in force
We conceived the project during the pandemic in anticipation of re-establishing the power of reconnecting people through live performance. It was clear for everyone working in education that learning music online had severe limitations. Singing – the fundamental steppingstone for an active first engagement with music – had become a particularly restricted activity, and many schools faced continuing nervousness about bringing pupils together in the hall to sing. We were determined that Hope 4 Justice would bring primary school pupils together to sing, collaborating with other art forms and secondary school age young people too.
Trinity Laban is proud of its long-established schools’ programmes across both dance and music, working with schools across London and beyond, with a particular emphasis locally in Lewisham and Greenwich and reaching those young people with the least access to the arts. We offer schools’ concerts for different Key Stages, student-led in-school performance workshops, and bespoke learning resources. We also have out-of-school music offerings including a weekly jazz programme in collaboration with Tomorrow's Warriors, creative music-making projects within our Animate Orchestra strand, and a four-day summer school. Uniquely, we also deliver schools projects involving both music and dance, creating work from scratch for the annual Lewisham Live Festival.
A new opportunity
Joining Trinity Laban almost four years ago from the Southbank Centre, I had the impression that the conservatoire's work with children and young people was well considered, thorough, creative and collaborative, but necessarily constrained in scale due to resources. So, when Lewisham won London Borough of Culture 2022, we saw we had the opportunity to be ambitious and grabbed it. We used it as a chance for young people to address through art one of today's most prominent issues: the climate emergency.
We wanted Hope 4 Justice to be a combination of music, dance and spoken word, so the first thing we had to do was assemble an artistic team. We brought together an amazing group of artists – Eska, poet Cecilia Knapp and choreographer Sarah Golding – who were passionate about the theme and totally committed to the project, even during periods of uncertainty as we sought funding. We eventually secured the project financially through Arts Council England, Open Hand Trust, and the Borough of Culture, with significant support from Trinity Laban itself.
An accessible format
Following a research and development phase with the artists and local teenagers working across dance, music, and text-generating, we started recruiting primary schools in autumn 2021, working towards two 50-minute performances from 1,000 young people from Lewisham. Twenty-six schools came on board. Initially, the onus was on schools to learn the material themselves, with the support of resources, training, and some tutor visits from Trinity Laban, with music-learning beginning in late February 2022, delivered in partnership with Lewisham Music.
What these young performers achieved in two epic outdoor performances to an audience of 2,000 in Catford on 18 June was extraordinary. We were blessed by the phenomenal force of Eska as our composer, as she composed the perfect songs for that group of young people. Eska created the music in her studio, not directly to paper or score like much young people's music of the past. The rhythms on paper would look daunting to a music leader coming to it cold, but instead with a combination of audio tracks and transcriptions, voice leaders were able to train the young participants in music with complex but familiar rhythmic shapes and patterns. To then perform these songs alongside groups of older kids dancing, teenage poets, Trinity Laban musicians and a live samba band was incredibly special.
Looking to the future
It's too early to assess the full impact of Hope 4 Justice, but it's clear that something has been created in which young people can engage powerfully with the climate emergency through performance. Or in the words of Fanta, a primary school participant, ‘I was really happy because our school has beautiful singers and loud voices to tell people that now is the chance to change the Earth.’
I believe that we have shown our local community and beyond what large-scale art making can be about, and have inspired hundreds of children to seek out, demand, and continue their engagement in music and dance.
www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/take-part/for-children-young-people/hope-4-justice
