"Beyond the Stage"

 What I Learned From a Summer School I Thought I Was Planning...

When the summer school started, I had a pretty clear idea of what I was expecting. Or at least, I thought I did.

After days of planning, reviewing, changing plans, changing them again, and occasionally wondering why I had decided to organise a summer school in the first place, we finally got there.

And then something happened that I probably should have expected, but somehow didn’t: the community became the most important part of it.

What started as a one-week programme turned into friendships, long conversations, unexpected questions and a lot of moments that made me think just as much as the young people themselves.

One of the things that really stayed with me was the question of how people can be the same age and still see the world in completely different ways. During the week, I met young people who were close in age but had very different experiences, personalities and ways of understanding things. And then there was the younger side of the group, some of them were only around 10, and honestly, the maturity I saw there was sometimes mindblowing.

Meanwhile, we were exploring theatre, different ways of expression, body language and communication. It was not really about becoming actors. It was more about figuring out how we communicate with each other, how we express things without words and, maybe most importantly, how differently we can all interpret the same situation.

At some point, they started noticing these differences themselves.

And that was probably one of my favourite parts. 

Because once they realised that they were not all thinking, reacting or expressing themselves in the same way, the whole thing became much more interesting. They were learning about each other without even really trying to.

For the final part of the summer school, we decided to turn all of this into a small project.

I gave my fair share of input, the Merkuri team gave theirs, and then we basically let the young people take over.

Their task was to present Zugdidi from their own perspective.

And I have to admit, they took it much more seriously than I expected.

They planned where they wanted to go, who they wanted to talk to, what they wanted to ask and what they wanted to record. I was there to assist and follow their progress, but the ideas were theirs. They went around Zugdidi interviewing people and collecting different opinions about the city.

And this is where the project became much bigger than just making a few little videos.

They talked to tourists who had just arrived and were already fascinated by the place. They spoke with local Georgians who had their own connection to Zugdidi, its history and its identity. They explored places like the palace and the botanical garden and started looking at the city through other people's eyes.

Because Zugdidi, despite being a relatively small city, has much more going on than you might expect at first.

There are young people coming here from bigger cities to spend the summer, slow down and enjoy a different rhythm of life. There are elderly people taking walks in the park and enjoying the amount of nature that seems to be everywhere. There are tourists discovering the city for the first time. And then there are the local youngsters, running around with their phones and cameras, trying to capture all of it.

What I really liked was that the young people were not just collecting other people's opinions. They were also collecting perspectives.

They started with their own idea of Zugdidi, and then suddenly they had ten, twenty or more versions of the same place. And somewhere between the interviews, the videos and the conversations, they were also learning from each other.

I think that was probably the biggest surprise of the whole summer school.

I went into it thinking mostly about activities, schedules, materials and making sure everything worked. Instead, I ended up thinking about community, perspective and how much young people already have to say when you actually give them the space to say it.

Was everything perfectly planned?

Absolutely not.

Were there things that went completely differently from what I had imagined?

Yes.

Did I sometimes have to improvise?

Definitely.

But maybe that is also what gave the summer school its own personality.

In the end, I would say it turned out great — not because everything went according to plan, but because it didn't.

It had its own little chaos, its own rhythm, its own conversations and its own vibe.

And somewhere between theatre exercises, body language, interviews around Zugdidi and conversations that continued long after the activities were finished, I realised that the summer school was not only about what I was teaching them.

I was learning too.

Anyway, until the next story.

—Timea