Diary Entry - Day 1, ZooNation, Zoo Youth & Sadler's Wells youth group, Laura Dajao, Saturday 19th March 2011

So today we worked with 3 artists dealing with a speciality each: art, creative writing and dance. It was cool to see so many different abilities and styles that people were involved in, although I felt like one of the oldest people in the room. Really experienced dancers like ZooYouth and quite shy and timid participants who didn't say much. The icebreaking session definitely got us talking and in groups we were asked to brainstorm around the words London and heartbeat. Moving onto more specific ideas we were asked to interpret the more difficult concepts and try and draw or describe them in picture form. From my group I chose to describe crime. Quite difficult but I think my drawings seemed to be quite abstract! Having done our own drawings we were asked to walk around the room and exchange our drawings. It was interesting seeing other people's perception of another drawing that wasn't theirs. We then did some acting with gestures and given 4 gestures we were put into pairs. Back to back on the count of three we had to choose a gesture and in the pair decide on what the story was. Developing more with the idea of gestures our groups got bigger and using the gestures we were asked to block a story board with three freeze frames each including a gesture. This then evolved into movement - trying to get from one freeze frame in a continuous flow, to the next, trying to tell a story. Definitely a fun workshop and cool to meet everyone.

Photos: Gigi Giannella