Love FREE art workshops? Looking for amazing volunteer opportunities? Programmed for youth, by youth – Tuesdays are the new Fridays!
YAM is a weekly drop-in program designed for youth and led by professional artists. Take part in the Leadership Committee from 3:30 – 4:00 pm to improve your leadership skills, gain volunteer hours, and be involved in the planning of fundraising initiatives and future workshops! Workshops run from 4:00-6:00 PM, and focus on a variety of different artistic disciplines.
Past projects included: Street Art, Perspective and Line Drawing, Printmaking, Music Production, Theatre & Improvisation, Digital Painting & Filmmaking.
Introduction to Improvised Theatre… and Then Some
September 24 – November 26, 2019
YES, AND… this is the golden rule of improvisation. Improviser, sketch-comedian, actor, writer, basketball lover, 6th member of Fake Cops Comedy Troupe, and teaching faculty at The Second City Toronto, Simon McCamus will join YAM this Fall 2019 for a 10-week Introduction to Improvised Theater workshop. Participants will be guided through different Improv games and exercises that focus on creating safe space for play, listening, YES AND, storytelling and how to be a respectful team player. They will also get to explore miming, character development and how to convey emotion and engage with their environment. Wallflowers beware, you may just find that your hidden comic wants to come out and play!
Participants will also have the opportunity to explore different forms of artistic improvisation throughout the ten weeks of workshops. Jennifer Laiwint will be leading a workshop that will focus on the creation of improvised visual art, Indrit Kasapi will be leading a discovery into improvised movement and dance, and Paulina O’Kieffe takes a dive into improvised spoken word and beats poetry. It’s time to say ‘YES’ to improvised theatre… and then some.
Learn more about these Amazing Artists
Jennifer Laiwint
Jennifer Laiwint is a Toronto based visual artist and DJ who works across the disciplines of video, text, sound and movement based performance. She is a graduate of York University’s Visual Arts Program and completed a one-year work-study program in Visual and Digital Arts at the Banff Centre. Jennifer’s practice takes a research and process oriented approach to explore the links between self-improvement culture, loneliness and social performance. Jennifer investigates what draws people into programs that offer promises of transformation and how our attempts towards self-actualization can be translated into movement, video and text. Her current work looks at how self-help messages get used and manipulated within online masculinist communities, such as Pick Up Artists. She has developed her work in residencies at the Banff Centre and NARS foundation in New York and has exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada and The United States, including Xpace, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, SummerWorks Performance Festival and Flesh Crisis Performance Art Festival. She is currently the non-local artist in residence at Duplex Artists’ Society in Vancouver and recently screened a new film work at the Western Front in Vancouver. Jennifer is a board member at Pleasure Dome and has a monthly DJ residency at Halfmoon BK, a community radio station in Brooklyn, New York.
Paulina O’Kieffe
Paulina O’Kieffe-Anthony is an award winning Toronto writer, performer, producer, arts educator and community advocate who is recognized as one of 150 Black Women Making Herstory (as featured on CBC) for her contribution to building the arts scene in Toronto.
A member of the League of Poets, her high level accomplishments include being featured in When Sisters Speak on stage at the St Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts (2017 and 2019), producing the Words by the Water Literary Festival and representing Toronto as a national team finalist in the Canadian Festival Of Spoken Word in 2015 and 2017. Paulina continues to be one of the main artist educators developing curriculum and teaching for established arts organizations including Lakeshore Arts and in schools across a number of school boards. Her work has been featured in media on Bell Fibe TV, Huffington Post Canada, AfroGlobal TV, Metro Morning and CBC Morning.
Announcement
As of Further notice, the Youth Arts Movement will be disbanded. In its place, we have launched a new program, the Youth Climate Collective.
Like our YouthArtsMovement page on Instagram to keep up to date about all the great workshops happening over the year.
