The Myanmar Project: Second Stage Development

*All images taken by children from the AYDC during their creative arts workshops

ON LOCATION: Yangon, Myanmar

By Amanda Humphries, March 2014

Creative workshops were underway this week after thoughtful preparation by Remnant Dance artists working in consultation with staff and children from the Andrew Youth Development Centre (AYDC) in Yangon, Myanmar. The program was coordinated by Occupational Therapist Katie Chown, who had ventured over to Myanmar to work with the children from the AYDC in 2013. Together with the Remnant Dance artists, the AYDC staff and translators, and three artistic collaborators from Australia, a meeting place was established and a week of fun and hard work was to be had!

There were 5 workshops the children could choose to participate in as they felt most drawn towards: Dance, Music, Visual Arts, Photo Documentation and Costume Design. All workshops were gently placed within the realm of encouraging free thought and play based learning. This was to heighten a sense of discovery and self direction for the children as a platform to tell their stories. We always started and ended the workshops with a group warm up and cool down activity lead by Katie that often had crazy bursts of dancing weaving together the different aspects of creative practice.

Through the process of facilitating and creating together, ideas, stories and connections emerged from the activities.  We are now at the stage of reflecting and weaving these ideas into a dance film and within visual art works and documentation.

Sometimes, the self directed activities and play was a little hard to initiate. It took a while for the kids to run with their own rhythms and stories; eager faces often waiting to see what all the other children were doing, or waiting to be given direction. Once the messy art gear was out, or the instruments were in their hands it was only a matter of time before curious minds began to experiment with the materials.

This was also an element we responded to within our creative practice. The meeting place was energetic, full of unspoken language and words, but their own stories, like Myanmar itself, was shrouded in mystery. This in itself was a story. This is what we found at our meeting place. There are stories there, we can see this, but we still don’t know what they are. And that is ok.

The work we are creating together with the children this week will now be incorporated in to the dance film.  This place allows for expressing creatively and exploring the meeting places, including sensory connections, through the metaphor of glass. The filming is taking place at the Nagar Glass Factory in Yangon. This morning marked the first 5am shoot! Mirroring phrases in the misty morning sunrise; reflections echoing through the broken glass, and the sound of the world in the distance.