Aaron Cunningham
Age: 26
I am an actor, artistic facilitators, director and one of the young creative leaders at Contact. I have been involved with Contact for many years and have been taught self-believe and empowered to make my dreams into a reality. I have learned from everything I have participated in, from facilitating workshops in the favelas of Rio to being a spokesperson on the same panel as the former president of India, Abdul Kalam.
For Future Fires I have chosen to create a film with a group of young males aged between 16 to 25 who live in isolated communities, mainly Miles Platting. I will be working with men from a range of backgrounds including refugees and asylum seekers; men suffering from mental health problems; drug dealers and abusers and those who commit or who have been a victim of crime. I have chosen the Miles Platting area because there are no facilities for older youths in the area and it suffers from high unemployment. It has also recently been seen associated with the BNP’s recent election to the European Union and the fact I have lived there for three years and experienced numerous accounts of racism.
I want to explore if the participants are happy with their lives and what effect the communities they live in has had on them as individuals. I want to tackle the issue they and their communities’ face. I hope to create at the end of the project a group of young men who have shared and learned from each other; gained confidence and acquired a voice within their community. I also want them to be accredited with a qualification which will give them an opportunity to access further work or education
Contact’s Future Fires programme, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, is empowering and enabling young and emerging artists from across Greater Manchester to design, plan and deliver their own community arts outreach projects.
Over the course of a year, the programme is providing these individuals, the Future Fires, with tailored training, mentoring, support and seed funding to enable them to develop a peer-led creative arts project in their chosen community.
The Future Fires will be showcasing their work in November.
FUTURE FIRES 2011 RECRUITMENT
If you’re 18-30, have experience of creative projects, are interested in working with a specific community, and think you are ready to lead a project yourself then the Future Fires programme could be your chance to do just that.
If you are interested in being one of the Future Fires in 2011 then contact Neil on 0161 274 0651 or email neilalexander@contact-theatre.org for more info. The details of the recruitment process for next year’s Future Fires will be announced in late November.
