We’ve now been touring My Secret Heart for 10 months and everywhere we have gone, organisers and audiences have been amazing. We have just arrived back from a British Council-supported tour of Japan. Together with presentations of the installation at Yokohama’s 150-year celebration festival and Creative Cities Symposium we also screened the 7-minute film at Super Deluxe in Tokyo with Mira Calix and Rob from Flat-e performing a live set.
The presentations of My Secret Heart were only part of the story – the British Council helped us to run workshops with homeless people and artists in Osaka and Yokohama, sharing our model of work and helping to grow and develop the community arts movement. The British Council had also made links with a huge array of social entrepreneurs, artists, support workers, policy-makers and academics to help spread our work as widely as possible.
The two areas we were working in – Kamagasaki in Osaka and Kotobuki in Yokohama are very isolated areas of homeless and disadvantaged people. Over 90% are elderly men although more and more young people are also living in these areas. With the help of some inspirational social activists (Kanayo Ueda from Cocoroom in Kamagaski and Tomohiko Okabe from Koto-Lab in Kotobuki) we engaged with residents of the area. There was an existing theatre group called Musubi in Kamagasaki and we worked with them to introduce music into their work and to write a song with them which will fit into their new play. We performed this together at the Aqua Festival in Yokohama.
We have felt enormously privileged to be involved in this work – although the community arts movement and the support infrastructure for homeless people is less developed that in the UK, the work on the ground is exceptional and it was an honour to be part of this. A massive thank you to all those we worked with, especially the British Council in Japan for making it happen.
