Celebrating in Luleå!
Tomorrow is the national day of the Romani people – and if you are in Luleå you have the chance to celebrate it together with Mertzi and Terno Drom, a great band who is joining The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour in May… exciting!
We got new stickers. They went on tour without us. Watch this:
RRR stopped by in Nyköping.
RRR listened to the pope @ Colluseum.
RRR ran for president in Italy.
RRR - on the way to the Vatican state.
RRR growing on a tree in Stockholm.
You seen it around? Send us your pic at stickertour@gmail.com
Here comes a report from the workshop in Umeå. Sorry to have kept you waiting!
We started off with some breakfast for the participants: 12 students at Dragonskolan, studying to become electricians. We also had two extra participants at thiw workshop, two youth workers from the municipality who work closely with youth councils and schools in the area. Ylva and Halvard did a presentation of The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour and how it all started, and then let workshop leader Jens start the workshop.
The first task was to clear the room in two minutes without talking, which the group did in amazingly one minute! Then we sat down to have a presentation round saying one’s name, where we came froma and a hobby. Then it was time to get warmed up! We did the hunter/protector and perfect triangle exercises (which you can read moe about here), and tried a new version of the hunter/protector with spider legs… Well fun! We did also the Ninja scroll which was a pair exercise where to touch each others hip or knee with your hand. The sun was shining outside and the small room got hot, so we took a water break before continuing.
Jens talked a bit on creatitivity and on how to create a good atmoshpere in the group to get creative. One thing he stressed was how to “fejka peppen” meaning to behave as if you were eager and energetic although you might have had the shittiest day ever. That will help the group out in the common work.
We then did the exercise “only suggestions” were one person suggested to another to do something that was not funny, not quick, not spectacular but just… boring or just anything. Then the other person – supported by the whole group – would cry “YES” with great enthusiasm. This is a way of boost yourself and also to get in to the habit of saying yes – as it is important in the creative process.
After all of these physical exercise, Jens made us list in groups different hobbies, emotions and places. We only had 2-3 minutes to list as many emotions etc as we could, and this was to help the flow. With limited time, it’s often easier to let go of any boundaries and just let the thoughts fly. We had a small presentation of the lists and what would happen if we put together one emotion, hobby and place and made an event out of them. Unfortunately I didn’t write down any of the events.
Then everyone listed, individually, the end of the sentence “everyone has the right to…” and then discussed what came up. Many needs were mentioned, like the right to food, to somewhere to live, education, safety, work and free time that you decide over yourself, love and to say what you think, to live the life each one choose to live, to feel happiness and an identity which one is happy with.
We followed up the lists with a talk on human rights, were we soon realised and got the feedback that the topic “human rights” feels very distant from the participants own lives and that we should rise the issue in other ways. Said and done! From that day we stopped saying that The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour is a tour for human rights – and instead RRR is now a tour for YOUTH RIGHTS.
After a break we got into the brainstorming for how RRR could be when coming to Umeå, and the participants divided into groups of three to write down any thought. They then got time for idea development where to make the ideas from the brainstorming real: when to have it, where and how? The groups then did an amazing job pitching the ideas for the rest of us, and here comes some of their ideas:
Group 1
2 days
Camping area, at Nydalafältet
Promoe, Timbuktu, local bands
Team sports etc, acitivites, lottery
Age limit: 14 +
Market
Shows; Travis Pestrana
Comedian
Group 2
Summer
Location at torget/kajen
Water show
Stage with bands, and talk about human rights in between the acts
Competitions to win sweets and cuddly toys
Jumping castle
Comedian
Use social media to advertise it, like Facebook and Apberget
Group 3
1 day
Location kajen/torget
Lake jump, to build a jump out in the river
Comedian to talk on human rights
Pedalboats
Snow, things that aren’t there during the summer
Big jump
Rail, bow, snow jump
Sausage-eating-competition
stage with artists playing during the night
Other activities during the day
Group 4
Festival 2-3 days
Free entrance or a maximum of 150 kr
July/summer
Location at Mariehemsängarna
Liveband
Local bands
Wipeout-tracks
Paintball
Activities during the days in city centre
Sumo wrestling suits
Rodeo
Tivoli
Alkohol allowed for over 18
After the pitching the participants got the chance to evaluate the day with us and we got a lot of ++++ and also thoughts to bring with us for how to deal with the “human rights/youth rights” and to get a bigger and cooler room for the next workshop…
We are so happy to have had the chance to make this workshop with our consults from Umeå and thankful for your input for RRR! THANK YOU GUYS! You are great!
Adam and Carro waiting for the gig to start.
Martina and Sofia came to digg the music and spread good vibes.
Gaiakollektivet blazed up the fire!
Pull up selecta!
And the dancefloor got heated.
Hanna tried the tasty logo.
Bella Lawson from Västerbottens Landsting came to enjoy the project they are supporting.
We found a chillout area in the back.
Still chillin, waiting for the bands to get started.
Sideshow Stringband from Umeå brought us great bluegrass.
Johanna and Martin paused the dance for a pic.
Some enjoy the spotlight, some enjoy the music. 😀
Ludvig shared his sweet smile with us all night.
Get your hoodie on, Mighty Mike and the Funksnatchers comin up!
The Funksnatchers from Umeå got us jumping, jumping, jumping.
And Adam just loved it.
Keep us close to heart.
Maria Östensson from Västerbottens Länsstyrelse came, danced and smiled for RRR.
The crowd who kept the dancefloor bubbling.
Double up!
Rewind, Ital Sounds and Peace from Gaiakollektivet.
Halvard and Robban celebrating the success! Or just pulling faces..?
Here are some more pics from the workshop last week. Good times! Will write down the whole programme for you as well, but that’ll happen later this week, just before eeeaster!
One group presenting their ideas for The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour.
Some of the participants.
Yesterday we spent the day with a great class from Dragonskolan in Umeå. More photos to come!
Rewind, Peace and DJ Ital Sounds from Gaiakollektivet.
Wohoo! We’re proud and happy to tell you that Gaiakollektivet – the greatest reggae/dancehall soundsystem up north in Sweden – will play at our show at Källarn on wednesday. Don’t miss out to dance to their sweet vibes!
Check out Gaiakollektivets blog here, and visit their facebook to see more photos.
The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour arranges a gig with some great Västerbotten musicians in Umeå on wednesday – The Funksnatchers and Sideshow Stringband are up live.
At Källarn, underneath Kafé Station in the city centre. Wednesday at 8 pm, free entrance. See you there!
Photo: Jonas Sjøkvist Karlsbakk
We stopped in Kirkenes on the way from Murmansk to give The Norwegian Barents Secretariat an update on the results so far and what we are heading at next. The whole office took some time off to listen to our one hour presentation and it was much appreciated!
The Secretariat has been working with youth in Barents for 18 years now (crazy!) and we are rookies compared to them, so it was great to get some feedback from them on our work. We also got some publicity as both the local news papers interviewed us, and there is also an article on norwegian at the Secretariats webpage and one in english at the webpage of The International Barents Secretariat.
Here comes the report from The Reggae Rock and Rights Workshop at Krilataya Guardia in Murmansk last week. You are all welcome with comments and suggestions on how to improve our methods!
We started off with a short introduction about the Barents region, BRYC, and how The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour started and what it is. This time we had an interpreter with us, Maria Petrova from Barents Youth Cooperation Office, and that forced us to be more precise in our words and also to get to the point instead of talking around the subject.
We got feedback in Tromsö that the participants wanted to know hard facts, so we tried to be better at that in Murmansk.
The presentation took like 10 minutes and then we did two energizers to get us going and laughing. We learnt them both from Jens Choong the week before and they were great! The first one is called “Hunter/protector” and the other one “The perfect triangle” and they give you a good laugh and also some good cooperation in the group. Let us know if you want to know the rules for the games and we’ll make a post about that!
One feedback from Tromsö was that the participants wanted to get more time and work more about the human rights topic, something that we did not have time to do in Murmansk as we only had approx. 2 hours. So we decided not to brainstorm on human rights but instead go straight on a massive brainstorm about how they want The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour to be like.
Teamwork - which ideas to pitch?
The participants sat in groups and came up with wonderful suggestions and plans which they pitched for us. Here are some of their great ideas:
- Goup 1:
- Jam session
- Informal communication (outside school, example show interesting places)
- Zoo
- Sledge/Pinguine riding
- Flash mob, Murmansk teen often take part in it
- Brazilian Carnival
- Group 2:
- Living and meeting with foreigners at for example camps and trips
- Dancing master classes
- Language courses
- Flash mobs
- Theme parties, example R’N’B, breakers, etc
- Music master classes: play instruments with famous people
- Group 3:
- Three parts:
- 1: Festival, concert
- Rock festival in the nature during the summer
- Bryan Adams & Nina Simone
- Visit cities in the Barents Region
- Good humour
- 2: Day of national food cooking
- Parachute jumping
- Youth tourism in Murmansk
- Rock climbing
- Presentations of your country
- Fire show
- 3: Make/play film about life of youth in Barents
- Create an organisation who works for youth
- Organisation that can advice youth who wants to go abroad and youth who come here from abroad
- Games/Seminars like today but in nature
- Prohibit all exploitation in the Barents region
- Bring Elvis back på life
After a break for fruit and snacks we did the pitching and then the participants got some minutes to write down their contributions to the tour. That was for us to know which resources there was in the group and we learnt a lot about our participants, although I think that we will develop this part a bit more for the future, not sure how yet.
We did a written feedback this time and got a lot of good feedback on both what was positive and what needs improvement:
Good
- Idea of this tour is very good
- Interview
- Different happy plays
- Of course, talk english language
- People is very friendly, nice
- Interview
- Brainstorm
- Break: talking to you is really interesting
- Idea of games
- Positive. 🙂
- Everything was great from the beginning till the end.
- Most of all I liked games, presentation and brainstorm
- You were perfect
- Funny, interesting
- Nice organisations
- Knew a lot of new things about us and about our possibilites
Bad
- More people for that give idea in people
- Presentation wasn’t so fascinating and exciting as it should be
- No examples of what you are doing so it was difficult to understand your goal
- Something more about your tour at the beginning cause its very interesting and we want to know more
- Maybe one more game :))))
Comments:
- 🙂
- Make some examples
- Make interest in your deal
- You are really cool so.. keep going!
Some of the participants at the Murmansk workshop.
In all we had around 17 participants during the workshop. Those who were interested were welcome to join The Murmansk Co-Creator Team and I think 8 people signed up!! Amazing!
Thank you people for a great day together with you at Krilataya Guardia. I hope that we can make it back soon!
We’ve had an amazing day together with a group of inspiring and great people from Murmansk. Thank you all for your contributions! Will give you a full update from the day later, but firstly, here are some pics:
On our way to the workshop. Well excited!
Adam loves Russia!
Checking out the music room, something that obviously impress Ylva.
Brainstorming on what to have on the ultimate Reggae Rock and Right Tour.
Dancing, languages, travelling, cooking, you name it!
A lot of post its were used - we like colours. 😀
All of the groups were doing an amazing job.
...ideas which they pitched for Ylva, ON Halvard...
But some ideas where just too big to fit on Halvard.
The phenomenal youth club.
Us with interpreters, director and some of the participants.
Workshop time!
Here’s a snapshot from a workshop that Jens Choong held with the Barents Regional Youth Council last week. We learnt some great theatre impro-exercises which we will try tomorrow with a youth club in the outskirts of Murmansk.
Photos: Julia Lapshina
Morning view out the window.
Ylva has arrived to Murmansk before the weekend, the filmcrew got here yesterday and tonight Halvard is joining us. Tomorrow we are to hold a workshop for a youth club in town and we’re well excited!
Photos: Elfrida Bergman
Photo: Maxime Jonsson
Today I woke up just to read this sweet article in the local newspaper (swedish). It’s about the documentary producer Adam and our trip to Murmansk on friday! Here’s Adams blog about the documentary (english): http://rrrdocumentary.blogspot.com/
Our logo is done, created by the artist Kine Yvonne Berntsen. Just look at this amazing piece of art:
The Reggae Rock and Rights logo, oh thank you Kine!
The photo was taken at the Future and Education Fair in Umeå, where I spent Thursday meeting new friends and coming Reggae Rock and Rights Co-creators. There were plenty of universities and companies there, and one of them gave the visitors the chance to create their dream version of Umeå. Sweeeet:
Umeå town.
Anyone could add whatever she or he wished for or appreciated with the city.
But I spent most of the time handing out my home-made Reggae Rock and Rights business cards and talking to inspiring people. Did you know that Umeå has two people working as “youth representatives” (here is a link in Swedish) in the municipality? I met them yesterday and got well impressed with the good work they are doing, for the youth around here and based on the youth’s own wishes. The whole idea with youth representatives is that you can call them if you have an idea or questions, and they can help you to get in contact with the rights people. The youth representatives work closely with youth clubs, youth councils and at schools as they need to be in touch with their bosses – the youth. I’ve never heard about anything like this before, at least not in Jokkmokk where I grew up. Do you have any youth representatives in your town?
Here’s a report from The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour Workshop in Tromsö last week. Enjoy!
Game rules for the Tromsö Workshop:
- Nobody is wrong
- Think BIG
- Build on each others ideas
- All ideas are everybody’s ideas
We started off with dividing the class into four (or was it five?) groups where we discussed the topic “Which human rights do youth have?”. We talked about many rights that we have, a lot about all the different liberties that the rights give us. We also got some great ideas for things that ought to be a human right. 😉
Then we did an exercise to help our thoughts fly high, where we got divided into pairs and was to practice to think further than our associations can take us. For example, when Halvard says “bike” then I started thinking of “summer”. And that was what I was not allowed to say! So I had to think of something that I did not associate with “bike”. A session could sound like this:
-Bike
-Eeh… cable!
-Pool
-Flowers
And it went on like that. Try it! It’s so much harder than I thought, and it forced me to think outside my own frames and into the thinking BIG mode.
With that in mind, we dived into the next step of the workshop: to brainstorm. The groups used pen, coloured A3 papers and plenty of post its and came up with great ideas on how to involve human rights in The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour and plenty of other things that me and Halvard would never have thought of on our own. Their help was priceless!
The groups pitched the ideas for us in 2 minutes each and here’s a list of some brief versions of their ideas:
- Make the tour unique, make it provocative to get people interested.
- Make sure to involve all sorts of culture, not just music. It could be theatre sketches, contests, sports events, anything!
- Use Facebook.
- Make it a festival, a whole concept and not just one show. And make sure that the music is diverse.
- Make it to a happening. Spread the word putting up stickers with the logo all over town, arrange contests where unsigned bands can compete to play with big stars.
- Make one political part, where youth can meet youth from other countries to get to know more about how life is for them, but also where youth can meet decision-makers directly.
- Be new, be special.
After the pitching, the musician Tonje Unstad gave a great show and we ended the workshop with an evaluation and some media.
We got some good feedback on how to improve the workshop. One important thing was to tell more facts from the beginning. In Tromsö me and Halvard told very briefly about the project and about the Barents region and the background of the cooperation. And we didn’t bring any information about human rights. The participants wanted to know more about both Barents and The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour so we will make sure to tell more next time!
Another thing was that the topic “Which human rights are important for youth?” seemed a bit hard to discuss in smaller groups, but was easier and more fun to talk about with each other in the bigger group. Maybe we even need to find another question to ask?
Many of the participants wanted to have more discussions about human rights, as they came with suggestions but never got to know if their guesses really were human rights or if they were just wishes. We need to think about how to make room for that discussion from now on..
We also got plenty of feedback on things that we ought not to change, like how inspiring the methods were and how the KaosPilots Maja and Kristian (who were workshop leaders) managed to enthuse the participants. The music was brill, it was fun to work in groups and a lot of the participants enjoyed the different way of working. Some got energized, others loved the pitching as it made them get concrete with their ideas, and it seems like almost all of us was surprised on how much we managed to do in only 2,5 hours.
One amazing result of the visit in Tromsö is that we have found nine amazingly creative and inspiring people interested to become co-creators of The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour. They will all meet up with Halvard in Tromsö and together find out what they are interested in and how we can help them reach it – and how they can help us.
Thank you Tromsdalen Videregående Skole for the gift you gave us through participating in the workshop! You are our heros!
/ylva
The Reggae Rock and Rights Tour 