This year we will launch our third iteration of our Beyond Boundaries Youth Program.
The last two years, we have worked with collaborating schools and funding partners to deliver sessions focusing on Visual and Performing Arts, along with wellbeing, artistic development and professional pathways in the arts.
In 2024 we ran our first iteration of our program ‘Beyond Boundaries’ with Big Picture School, Alesco College and Kotara public school. This program ran as a collaboration between Curious Legends and Newcastle Parkour, with a shared focus on wellbeing and creative expression through art and movement. The essence of this program is access to performing and creative arts for disadvantaged youth. The program offered a spectrum of exploration of the arts and creative practice through a series of mini workshops and opportunities to engage with the work here at Curious Legends. At the core of the practices covered in the mini workshop series is vulnerability, creativity, wellbeing and peer relationships. We focus on creating a fun, supported accessible space for young people to learn, play and create and asking students to reflect on their experiences.
Our 2024 program tailored content to each school, covering a combination of the following:
Physical Theatre: Participants were guided through exercises designed to encourage physicality as inspiration for character development and a form of creative expression.
Improv. Theatre: Students engaged with a range of games and exercises designed to help them respond spontaneously to situations and prompts. We worked on skills such as public speaking, word association, thinking on the spot, connecting to emotions as a source of inspiration and creative expression, and other forms of character work.
Mask and Prop Making: Students explored identity and character development by creating masks and props which we performed with.
Project Development and Installation: A selection of students engaged with us in an art installation which we created in collaboration with Ship 4 Good. Students developed ideas for murals and an interactive search activity.
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In 2025 we ran 8 weeks of intensive ‘internship’ days with Big Picture school, where we focused on:
Improv and Physical theatre: The group went through a series of warm ups and exercises to challenge their comfort zones and develop skills at developing plots and characters
Storyboarding and Puppetry: Students worked in groups of 3-5 to storyboard and work with our puppets to deliver short performances with rehearsed and improvised scenes
Prop making and Crafting: Students created props for our Halloween event Wallsend Frights, which were used in a ‘spot it’ styled scavenger hunt at the event. Students also created small insect props and puppets, including an animatronic Venus fly trap, as part of our development towards creating an insect themed show in 2026 and 2027.
Artistic practice, pathways and the Japanese concept of ‘Ikigai’: Students heard from our studio artists about their journey’s into arts and theatre, and were asked to reflect on different artists meanings, ‘why people make art’, and the place of art in their lives.
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Our Beyond Boundaries Program works with students to meet them at the depth of experience that they are willing to engage with. For some students, engaging with one or a few of the mini-workshops gave them a first taste of the arts. Some participants experienced a stretch in their comfort zone engaging with the content, and reflected back to us feeling challenged in specific workshops, opting in or out based on their comfort. Other students experienced a lot more comfort with the content and were able to reflect on themselves as performers and artists openly with their peers, receiving constructive feedback and tools for supporting their wellbeing as developing young people and artists.
Our Beyond Boundaries program is set to run yearly, expecting a return in Term 4 of 2026 in the form of a mini-series program and opt-in professional creative practice and development.
Big thanks to the sponsors of our 2024 program City of Newcastle and Create NSW, and to the sponsors of our 2025 program Port Waratah Coal Services, whose support will also see the delivery of content in Term 2 of 2026.
