LOCAL boys Jamahl Blair and Jay Tickle have been invited to attend a one-week hip hop workshop to be held in Melbourne.
Both boys attend Macintyre High School and the Melbourne workshop is something both feel they will benefit greatly from and Jamahl said he is looking forward to it.
“Hopefully it will be a good experience so I can pursue my career in dance,” Jamahl said.
“I think I can be successful and hopefully take on my career in dance and pass it on to young Indigenous students,” he said.
It will be an exciting trip for Jamahl who said he has never flown before, but has seen a lot of disaster films.
Jay will be travelling with Jamahl and said he is also looking forward to going to Melbourne.
“The workshop here was great fun, I had a lot of fun with everyone from down there,” Jay said.
“I was surprised to get an invitation to go to Melbourne, I didn’t expect it because we were just dancing here.
“It’ll be something else I’ll have up my sleeve to be able to put on my resume,” he said. However, being invited to attend a workshop and getting there were two different things for the boys. Neither could afford the airfares, and that’s where Lyn Lennon from Inverell Family & Youth Support Services came to the rescue.
“I applied to Regional Arts NSW Quick Grants and was successful in securing funds to pay for the flights for the two,” Lyn said. “We were quite lucky, quick grants are for programs that just pop up at the last minute, which this just really did, we had notification at the end of September that they had been successful.
“They will do really well, Jamahl was a bit of a rare find, I don’t think a lot of people knew that he had the moves that he did. Jay’s had a little bit more experience, but again he hasn’t had the opportunity of expert choreographers and working with the elite people that these guys will be this time around,” Lyn said.
The boys were invited to the workshop after Armajun Aboriginal Health Service, in conjunction with the Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council (AH&MRC), brought Indigenous hip hop Productions (IHHP) to Inverell for a workshop for hip hop in September.
IHHP was engaged to develop a production that conveyed messages about rights, respect, responsibility choices and consequences.
The aim was to empower and educate 12 to 19-year-old adolescents to make informed choices about sexual and reproductive health and understand the negative impacts of alcohol and other drugs on their health.
