My Pals, My Park, My Pride

A Traveller Pride Project made by Outlandish Theatre Platform in collaboration with youths at Candle Community responding to personal and community Traveller Pride.

Through four workshops filled with play and creative writing activities - making a costume for a four headed beast, reading Rachael Hegarty’s poems using Traveller Cant and sharing a book of nursery rhymes recorded by children from the Traveller Community, pretending to be a king and making up rules, designing a sculpture of ‘woman’, making up rhymes, responding through word association to topics like ‘dreams, woman and place’, connecting words to movement, interviewing each other and asking comfortable and uncomfortable questions, being a guide in your own neighbourhood - we collaboratively researched the meaning of belonging as individuals to Labre Park as a place and to the Traveller Community.

Together we rhymed, jumped, laughed, sang and interviewed each other and older members of the Travelling Community at Labre Park.

As artists we wanted to capture the playfulness of our meetings with the young participants in this project as well as the complexities of capturing belonging and pride for young people, especially teenagers, who by nature are on a journey to find out who they are in this world.