Tag: Music

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Game Game Theatre Theatre Uncategorized

GOAL 17 – Children make the world!

Foto Philip Mackenbrock

What will the world look like in 30 years? Who decides on the measures to combat climate change? What role do money or human or children’s rights play? What would I change if I had something to say?

GOAL 17 is a project by and with two mixed 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes of the Nürtingen primary school in Kreuzberg, Berlin. As part of a creative research project, 45 children examined the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals and associated global and social problems.

In the first project phase, different thematic and methodological approaches were developed in the context of an interview workshop: The students approached the 17 goals and developed questions, researched their environment, conducted interviews with experts and exchanged ideas with adults, i.e. the generations that are currently setting the agenda for their future.

The interviews became the basis of a large three week artistic play workshop, in which the children increasingly became experts themselves, imagining a possible future together. Accompanied by five artists from the fields of music, theatrical improvisation, visual arts, stage and costume design, they became curators of their own research material, designing their own visions of the future and means of involvement in it. They employed the diversity of the group and the potential this provided to understand the global situation, its power relations, its definition of knowledge and their participation with it.

Video Interview Workshop GOAL 17:

The final presentation of GOAL 17 – Children make the world! was a creative vision of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, exhibiting living and negotiation spaces, global communication structures and fictitious forms of coexistence for all citizens of the world . The children celebrated their collective proposal, presented to the public performatively and interactively as a large manifesto created by children for children and adults. 

Videodocumentation artistic play workshop

Foto Philip Mackenbrock
Foto Philip Mackenbrock
Foto Philip Mackenbrock
Foto Philip Mackenbrock

We would like to thank all interviewees for giving us their time and knowledge!

We would also like to thank our funding partners:

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Game Game Theatre Theatre

Operation Lemgo

Two months of school development through art

What do you do if a school no longer works? When classes can hardly be taught anymore, teachers are frustrated, parents are dissatisfied and the atmosphere is tense? When students complain that they hardly learn anything, that they don’t feel they have a voice and that attacks are the order of the day? And if a great deal of the lessons are canceled due to illness?

sideviews was invited to set up an interdisciplinary project in order to intercept the substitution classes and to react flexibly in organizational terms to the constant changes. A large temporary workshop was opened over two months, accommodating different classes daily. The elementary school children examined their school culture by means of a variety of artistic methods. Seven artists from sideviews accompanied them, offering workshops as part of an open laboratory: theatrical improvisation, film, documentation, boxing, songwriting, rap, stage and costume design, model building, participatory spatial development, performance, fine arts, photography and dance choreography. 

Themes were elaborated and further developed according to the needs of the children, beginning with the establishment of rules and a culture of discussion, through the exploration of sensitive points in everyday school life, to the development of a culture of communication and welcome. Eventually, common project goals were developed by means of discussions, interviews, performances, invitations and performative elements. 

Participation, self-efficacy training and daily practice of empathy and a culture of debate promoted a democratic understanding in order to initiate changes step by step. The themes distilled pervaded all workshops in that they could then be processed on an artistic level and made tangible. Processes were continuously documented and made visible to the school public. The students were supported in small groups and were able to create a vision of their school based on their interests and needs. They dealt playfully and artistically with their culture of welcome. With possible uses and reinterpretations of classrooms. With rules, techniques and concentration through boxing. With their different languages. With self-presentation, improvisation, songwriting and poetry. With theatre scenes about everyday school life, as well as their presentation and evaluation. With dance and movement work as an artistic intervention and with rap.

The result was a pop-up café that also served as an “open house for artistic presentations”. Even pupils not involved in the project were able to show on stage what they could do. The café was set up in such a way that it could continue to be self-organized. 

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Game Game Theatre Theatre

WORLDwide… New

Is the world reality or is the world just what we imagine? 60 children from the Nürtingen elementary school in Berlin-Kreuzberg spent more than a year looking for possible answers. In this urban ethnographic experiment, students examined the social diversity in their environment on the basis of video interviews. They were confronted with a wide variety of topics: asylum seekers, politics, drug dealers, immigration and government. 

Using dramatic methods and video documentation, the research was made visible and tangible. The information on a wide variety of life plans and identities acquired in the interview workshop was then staged: in a three-week game, acting, directing, storytelling, costume design, visual arts and music were the motor that set a major negotiation process in motion. It turned out that identities and realities can be reconstructed. And that the rituals, self-images and attitudes can be changed, as can the world.