I finished the job as a facilitator for the youth theatre group at Lapinlahden lähde. It was a long-term commitment, a 90-minute of theatre workshop once a week from August 2022 to May 2023, directed towards a group of teenagers with immigrant backgrounds in Helsinki.
On the last day, the teenagers gave me gifts to thank me: “Luxury Fudge,” tea bags, gummy candy, a tea candle, a postcard of Cicely Mary Barker’s artwork, a seashell, and the hand-drawn outfit designs for me and the other facilitator. I was, of course, touched by their gesture, knowing how far they had come since the beginning. The outpour of their enthusiasm continued. They were thanking each other for the little theatre community where everyone learned to have fun together while respecting each other’s talent and differences. … I mean, this is huge for the teenagers, and probably the most important of all is that they wanted to continue. They wanted to keep on being in the community where their uniqueness and creativity can be seen, appreciated, and developed.
Nibbling on the Luxury Fudge, I ponder on the significance of this. Theatre might be one of the most wholesome educational frameworks. You not only learn how to make theatre but also develop a community that functions through creativity, respect, collaboration, and support for one another. And such a community is especially important to minorities, whose existence is often diminished and/or ignored by the majority.
However, there’s an annoying challenge: how to maintain the financial resource for pedagogical expertise to facilitate such an open, compassionate, creatively exciting educational space. More financial support is needed to continue a theatre workshop series for the immigrant youth in Finland. If it can make a marginalised teenager find his/her/their way to be creative, learn to work with others in a respectable way, and grow up to be an amazing human and artist, what a great investment that is for a society. Its worth is not measurable in the currency of money. In fact, I’ve got lovely gifts from talented young people. And they are all friends now and more confident in who they are. Priceless. You cannot get richer than that.
