Youth empowerment: Icon Theatre and the Theatre31 project

Youth Performance Partnerships, a Government-funded initiative delivered by the Arts Council, aims to inspire children and young people deprived of access to creative activity in five areas of the country – Derby, Salford, Croydon, Plymouth and Medway.

As luck would have it, the three and a half year project was due to launch in June 2020 when the world was in the grip of the worst pandemic in living memory. It soon became clear that the best laid plans of all those cultural planners would need a radical re-think.

‘We felt we had to do anything we could to make things happen despite the restrictions of the pandemic,’ says Nancy Hirst, artistic director of Theatre31, the programme serving Medway and Sheppey, and founder of the Medway-based community theatre company Icon. ‘One positive of the pandemic was that it allowed us to reflect on how we engage with young people. So while most of our activities are geared to being in person, some aspects proved to work well digitally.’