Community Blog - 01/12/25

TPT Community blog – November 2025Our Playground community work continues to flourish. In 2025 we’ve been holding regular Well Read sessions at Baseline Studios – every Wednesday morning we have a great group and we’ve been reading a wide range of plays recently. If you’re ever tempted then please come along - a friendly welcome is guaranteed. We’ve also been running weekly sessions at Chamberlain House, Dementia Resource Centre – these have included music, puppetry, storytelling and art.

To make sure you can get involved even if it’s tricky to travel, we continue to offer our Online Creative Writing every Tuesday evening. It’s been abrilliant creative outlet for loads of participants throughout the year.Today we want to shine the spotlight on one of our more recent activities. As with all our community work, it’s made possible thanks to the support of The Linbury Trust. Inter-generational LGBTQ+ Arts ProjectIn collaboration with Saatchi Gallery, Age UK and LGBTQ charities Metro and Step Forward, we have been running a fantastic project, bringing together 15 young people, 6 elders and various LGBTQIA artists and facilitators to share ideas, creativity, histories and time and ultimately create a new piece of art to be showcased at the Saatchi Gallery on December 3rd.

The sessions began with both groups, young and old, in separate locations. Each group was given the opportunity to bond and gain confidence with one other, with conversations touching on respect, language and safeguarding. Professional artists from the worlds of fine art and theatre attended each of the sessions to guide groups in artistic specialisms. LGBTQIA+ artists like Lewis G Burton and Wax Wings, theatre designer Daisy Blower, costume specialist, Hugo Aguirre and finally model and folkloric artist Hayett Balerbi McCarthy. These artists were supported by LGBTQIA artist Karl Murphy, who is based in Saatchi’s learning department, hosting each session. The groups gained skills independently, before coming together in Saatchi’s building.

The sessions then included tours, talks and most excitingly making and creative time, exploiting the rich artistic resources at Saatchi. Two of the elders, former members of Bloolips, were performance artists themselves, these elders were then employed on the same basis as the professional experts and afforded time to educate the youngers on RBKC’s local LGBTQ history, both socially and in performance. They touched on the 1980’s AIDS crisis and the loss of RBKC as a hub for LGBTQ peoples, but also highlighted the cultural shifts, which can alienate both young and old from each other. In order to hold the groups together and prioritise safeguarding and wellbeing of, especially, the young people, Check ins and outs were run each session by a constant Theatre based facilitator, provided by The Playground, who not only organised and represented the young people, but were themselves artists, chipping in with Q&A’s, expertise and their own LGBTQIA history.

Each facilitator was carefully chosen, specialising in stage performance, screen performance and creative writing, as well as representing different elements of the LGBTQIA spectrum.

These facilitators, Marc Elliott, Seyan Sarvan and Shane Convery provided a link between the worlds of art and the participants. Karl Murphy says ‘It’s the absolute highlight of my time at Saatchi, the best thing we’ve done, I feel like this is the culmination of all of our work and what we wanted to do with the department. It was really well attended and the free food and travelworked so well. The young people were so eager to speak to the elders andthere were so many private moments of exchange and learning. The artist we brought in is very ‘cool’ and the young people were hugely interested in them. Unprompted, many of them were asking about careers in the arts, artistic pathways and fine art, specifically in fact one person, who said they saw itbeing a real career path for the first time. There were loads of conversations about the logistics of entry to art. I could see how interested the young people were in the elders, nervously asking if they could go and ask them private questions and mixing over the lunch in a way that was just beautiful to see.’