These recent times have been some of the hardest challenges we've faced and as a community, it hit us pretty hard. However during these difficult times, here at Pocket Size Theatre, we wanted to spread a little positivity and celebrate the work that people are still managing to generate during these difficult times. In this ‘Spotlight On’ series, we'll be speaking to our friends in the industry to share what they are up to during these challenging times and how you can be involved.
Let's stick together, share the love and get through this as a community!
Here we caught up with Will and Gavin co-creators of GymJam, an open artists community dedicated to getting a creative sweat on.
Can you give us a little intro into who Gym Jam are and what you do?
Gym-Jam is an open artistic community founded by William Townsend and Gavin Maxwell. Primarily, we offer creative workshops for movers and theatre-makers. Our first series of workshops Creative SWEAT, which were hosted at The Monobox, were 1-day intensive sessions designed with the aim of getting participants to sweat, play and create. To put it crudely, they were workout sessions for theatre-makers, who wanted a physical and creative blast. We found we preferred keeping fit by doing physical theatre exercises as well as topping up our skillset, as opposed to monotonous home workouts. Our workshops are a sandbox style environment which is playful, open, and free of expectation.
What made you want to start Gym Jam?
Gym-Jam was born out of a conversation that we both had about a lack of affordable, regular and accessible physical theatre training. We’re aware that there is an abundance of companies and opportunities to train, but we wanted to create a space where working-level artists could play, sweat and create that was agenda free. In the past we have both experienced spaces where bringing ourselves didn’t feel like it was enough, or part of our focus was preoccupied with the possibility of a job opportunity or audition. We felt we needed a space free of expectation, ulterior motives and agendas where the focus was purely on rigour, playfulness and creative provocation. At the very beginning before we knew what it was, we were just playing around in office spaces between sessions, spilling cups of tea and challenging each other to find another creative game or movement using office stationery. Most of these have made it into our sessions now! Minus the stationery... Mostly.
