photos by jarrett mccreary, koof ibi umoren

Through an ongoing partnership with the Attic Youth Center, Philadelphia’s only independent LGBTQ youth center, young artists from AYC help to  inform the content of each generative phase of Honey Honey. Participating youth contribute material and proposals for activities, provide feedback, and generate songs, poetry and movement alongside the creative team.

The Teen Collaborators program enables young people to exercise creative agency that places them at the same level of influence as a professional or an adult in their lives. This supports the process of healing and unlearning societal conventions that have taught them to remain silent. In conversation with the Teen Collaborators, we are developing young characters that bravely face moments of reckoning when their passions, their queerness and their differences are challenged.

Our 2018 workshop with the Attic Youth Center focused on character, and the fundamentals of devising. Participating youth wrote stories and character monologue from image sources, created gesture and behavior, and collaborated with the adult ensemble to create scenes to evoke place and mood. 

The 2019 workshop centered on world-building, thinking about the rules and concepts of video-games and how the principles of expanded reality in these games could be utilized in our current world. We engaged in open conversations about young-adult narratives, the confines and expansiveness of particular identities and  what we collectively were interested in exploring. 

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We are endlessly grateful for the work contributed by our friends from the Attic.