Fun Palaces take place in all kinds of cultural venues over the Fun Palaces Weekend in October: theatres, libraries, museums and arts centres (in addition to the ones made in community centres, on boats, in gardens and on housing estates). We always encourage venues to hand-over to their community for a weekend and see how the community want to use the building, and what they bring when invited to.
Last year, artsdepot made the decision to take their Fun Palace out of the building and into a local community centre. In this story, they share what happens when you handover space to the community. Louisa, Director of Programming and Participation talks about the artsdepot Fun Palaces journey.
We’ve been making Fun Palaces for nine years, and I’ve been doing it since I started working here six years ago, so we’re committed Fun Palace Makers. It’s been embedded in our programme for a number of years and is very much known by our staff and community as a key part of our programme.
We always have some sort of cumulative artwork, that starts at the beginning of the day and the community contribute to, we have had a planetarium for a number of years which goes down an absolute storm and historically has been in one of our theatre spaces. We always have a book swap – because that’s a key part of a lot of artsdepot activity and that’s a nice way for people to bring something and then also take something away. There’s a mixture of performance and workshops – something performative that people can get engaged in and some workshops they can really get stuck into.
The thing I always really love seeing is that we have families who return, and we tend to get the whole family, so young children and might return with grandparents and they come year on year as their children are growing, so it feels very intergenerational, we’ve also had some of our over 55s programme participants come too. And as much as a large part of our community is families, there is space for individuals to come, whatever age and engage with what’s happening. For me that’s the real highlight.
Funding has always been a challenge, and the ethos of Fun Palaces is that it’s accessible and free for everybody and so how we tackle the barriers people might face to take part, often has a financial impact on us, so a challenge is ensuring we continue to offer something that is accessible to everybody, in a sustainable way for us. One of the ways we addressed this was by thinking where the Fun Palace is taking place. We are a venue and have a building and it’s obviously really important to us for people to come into the building, but we trialled running the Fun Palace in a different part of the borough in collaboration with a community centre and not only did we see new people come, but some people travelled across the borough to come. It showed that by trying to approach one of the challenges in a different way it gave some rewards we weren’t expecting.
We knew it was the same people coming every year, and wanted more people in the borough to become a part of it, so we began thinking about how can we bring new people to the Fun Palace. We partnered with a community centre, and as a result people who came to the Fun Palace, were, by estimation, people who may not come to artsdepot. Lots of young people came in to ask, “What is this?”, so we got to have conversations with them. And some people came, because they always come to artsdepot Fun Palace, and still wanted to join us.
It had a very different feeling, it was more transient – the activity, we adapted and changed depending on who was there at what time. A local publisher came, one who publishes children’s books in lots of different languages. There are a lot of languages spoken in Barnet, and they donated a huge number of children’s books that we could give away as part of the day, which was a really lovely way for us to connect with people. At the end of the day there was an ad hoc performance by some of the young people who were there, they were asking our technicians to put on some music tracks, so we ended up having a performance that we weren’t expecting from some of the community. It was great that they felt as though they could, and as though it was theirs, because we were in their space. It was a different dynamic and a different relationship, which was really joyful.
We’ve definitely strengthened our relationship with the community centre, I know that we’ve got better profile in that area as a result. People spoke about the Fun Palace on social media in a really positive way; anecdotally we really felt the impact of that day and I’m hoping we can build on that.
Ready to make a Fun Palace?
Every year thousands of people make Fun Palaces for their own local community – sharing skills, meeting new people, creating connections.