A busy start to the New Year for us Common Ground team members, who spent the last week of January delivering full-time workshops to a group of 20 men at HMP The Mount. The group were presented with material that had been compiled for them during sessions with the Battersea Park School students, and were able to create both individual and group responses to be passed back to the school group. Exploring the creative tools of storytelling and percussion, the men were also able to initiate new elements of the dialogue: a call and response percussion piece led by our freelance percussionist, Tommy, proved to be particularly successful, and was put straight back into practice on Thursday, when Tommy taught the same piece to a small group of older adults at the Tooting Graveney Day Centre. The enjoyment both groups gained from creating the short piece proved that there is always common ground to be found – if not in specific musical preferences then certainly in the function that music can serve in a community.
Back in the classroom today, the Battersea Park students were busy storyboarding ideas for the short film they will make alongside our freelance documentary maker – the responsibility is a big one, as the students have to represent not only their own views and opinions about the project, but those of the other participant groups as well. Tomorrow we’re going back again, and will share the recent input from both the Tooting and HMP The Mount groups with the students. Whether it’s what they expect to hear remains to be seen, and there is every possibility that the Common Ground film will have to adapt more than once in order to accommodate the experiences of such a diverse group of community members….