Jambo! Team Kenya Bootcamp 2017

It’s been Bootcamp time.

We’ve been in Diani Beach on the East coast of Kenya.

A team of five performing artists have met and shared ideas, games and meals.

There have been visits from Baboons in the kitchen, that was quite scary.

There are groups of monkeys jumping around the trees and there’s even a collection of Collabus monkey, these are endangered and its been special to share an environment with them.

On our afternoon off we sailed out to the sand banks and snorkelled among the coral, seeing some very spindly legged big birds waiting to catch their fish breakfast.

“You are such a beautiful bird,

Waiting for the fish.

Wing-span so wide,

In clouds you glide,

Sweeping eyes on rising tide”

Each morning we share a breakfast, Mira always cuts up the fruit. We scrub our laundry in a green bucket. We learn a shared gestural language to use a concensus decision making process. We teach each other our favourite games and marvel at how rules differ from country to country.

Jess runs along the beach.

Nicholas juggles everywhere he goes.

Abi rigs silks in a tree.

Mira is upside down a lot.

We have created a circus show based on the sunshine rising as a metaphor for lighter, better, more positive days to come. Our moral is that we need team work to suceed. Our bootcamp time has been incredibly supportive to remind us of the basics we need to survive;

Listening

Respect

Nurture

Positivity

Gratefullness

Peace

Play.

POST SHOW SHARE AT THE LOCAL SCHOOL

We performed the debut of our show to 300 students at the local school. Under the shade of the fig tree, in between the concrete buildings we played the space as the children brought chairs to sit among. It was incredibly well received and a total joy to test out the first version of the show and get some great feedback throughout. They laughed, we laughed, we all connected, the teachers loved it as much as the children, we leaned the flow of the show and how to support each other to play it out. Here’s the facepaint we put on each other before the show, before the sweat dripped it down our faces.

I am left with a deep rooted feeling that this bootcamp time was here to for us to bond and nurture our bodies, ready for the teaching project to come. We are indeedily well and truly bootcamped!

Having written our initial curriculum and learn some Swahili we are ready to travel west back to Nairobi and begin our teaching adventure.

Asante Sana,

Big peace and respect for the work, Chez*cxx