Youth Get Creative with Digital Storytelling Project
2011-05-05
Luminato and Manifesto work with students in Regent Park and St. Jamestown to explore contemporary forms of storytelling, and create short film narratives to be screened as part of the Luminato Festival in June
The Luminato Festival happens once a year in Toronto for 10 very special days in June, filling our city’s streets with arts, culture, and creativity. Celebrating its fifth anniversary this upcoming June, Luminato will once again flood the downtown core with a wide range of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary arts experiences. Programming ranges everywhere from free outdoor music concerts, theatre world premiers, magic shows, movies, fashion, food, and much more — with new surprises each year to keep the Festival exciting. Luminato aims to provide something for everyone, but not just during those ten days in June. In fact, a lot goes on at Luminato during the pre-Festival season. The Luminato Education and Community Outreach department, led by Jessica Dargo Caplan, partners with a multitude of community organizations and offers free pre-Festival workshops for children and youth living in Regent Park, St. Jamestown, and Parkdale. These workshops are facilitated by local and international artists and aim to equip participants with unique arts experiences that tie directly to the Festival’s program; this year, Luminato is exploring the idea of adaptation and contemporary storytelling.
Selected youth participants from Pathways to Education and UforChange have been taking part in Luminato’s Youth Digital Storytelling Project. Participants have been working with world-renowned spoken-word artist, Boonaa Mohammed to learn the art and the technical craft of telling stories in new, innovative ways. Dubbed the “voice of a generation,” Boonaa is no stranger to workshop facilitation. He often conducts community writing workshops and seminars, and through his process helps youth discover and tell their own stories. “I’m not a fan of sideline education; I feel like people have to have a hands-on experience,” said Boonaa, who designed the interactive 10-week workshop program with the Luminato team and Manifesto Community Projects, a non-profit grassroots organization working to unite, energize, support, and celebrate Toronto’s vibrant and diverse music and arts community.
“When I heard about this project and the communities that we would be working with, I was very excited and very honoured,” said Boonaa in an interview just before the workshops began. “I have a lot of friends and family members who come up from these neighbourhoods, and it is important to give young people, like myself, the opportunity of learning creative mediums like storytelling, which is often not available and accessible to people in these neighbourhoods.”
Over the past four years, Luminato and its community partners have witnessed firsthand the multitude of social and educational benefits these programs offer youth in the community. These pre-Festival workshops focus on the creative process and explore the possibilities of arts education, allowing youth to take creative risks without the worry and frustration of academic grading.
Ahalya Kathirkamanathan is a recent high school graduate from Jarvis Collegiate, and a participant in the Youth Digital Storytelling Project. She applied to the program with the intention of trying something new: “For me, I have never even tried to do film before, and I’m kind of putting myself in a position where I’m trying something new and creative — exploring how I can put out that creativity. This [program] is really important because when I was in high school it was kind of just academics, there was pretty much no art section, no filmmaking. There was no space for us to experiment with different things. I wish I had something like this earlier when I was in high school.”
Luminato has equipped these young, budding filmmakers from Regent Park and St. Jamestown with the necessary filmmaking equipment and instruction to create their own short films. The end results of this exciting program will be showcased during the Luminato Festival at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on June 18th and 19th, from 2:30 to 4:00 pm. For more information about this and other programs, visit luminato.com.
