Summer school is an opportunity to turn up the heat: an intensity of experience in which the participants have to really engage with each other as individuals and in a group, work, writes Deborah Bestwick.
The Oval House Summer School is part of a year-round programme of open access classes and workshops in which the social opportunities are as important as the discovery and nurturing of artistic talent. Tutors work hard to engage those who drop by to lurk in our café, run taster sessions in youth clubs, and are backed up by café and front-of-house staff who also boast youth worker skills and experience.
This year we had an opportunity to take twenty 13 to16 year-olds to a music camp on a lake in Minnesota. Competition for places was intense, so the recruitment was designed to extract maximum commitment to the process. We did taster workshops in 14 schools with 300 students, determined to make our task the more onerous by finding young people who may not yet be engaging with the arts in their free time, and accessing those who (for a variety of reasons to do with inclusion, expectation, parental support, etc) do not just pick up a leaflet and turn up on the dot with a c.v. of child star appearances!
Forty of these were invited to attend a week-long half term ?intensive?: a brilliant week of work with professional musicians (led by Eugene Skeef) and tutors, and an experience in its own right. But unless they attended punctually every day they could not be eligible for a place at the camp. Using a range of criteria, (teamwork, musical ability, appetite for hard work, etc) our Head of Youth Arts had the agonising task of selecting 20: but the hoops were still not behind them! They were required to spend the next half term preparing for the experiences of the trip, absenteeism once again an eliminator.
The investment by the young people led to a powerful ownership of the work: feeling they had earned the experience liberated them to make the most of it. A fierce group ethic was already established, and a sense of belonging made them open to the musical and other experiences that came their way.
Excited about the musical agenda of the camp, the students (most of whom had never left an inner city environment) discovered for themselves how the encounter with the natural world (they went on a four-day wilderness canoeing trip) transformed their ideas for their own composition. Every day the group did drumming and composition masterclasses, and worked towards individual and group compositions. The intensity was total, and the effect summed up by Head of Youth Arts, Nicholai LaBarrie: ?We took a bunch of kids who like music. We brought back artists.?
Deborah Bestwick is Director of the Oval House. t: 020 7582 0080; e: deborah.bestwick@ovalhouse.com; w: http://www.ovalhouse.com