Free workshops offer a creative taste for aspiring musicians and artists in the Riverina

For teenagers in the Riverina with a love of music and a desire to try their hand at mixing a beat or writing some lyrics, the team from Heaps Decent will be back in Wagga with free workshops in the upcoming holidays.

Claud Bailey is the community outreach manager for the Sydney-based organisation that works with young people across NSW to provide creative opportunities.

“Heaps Decent has been around since 2008 and it was started by two DJs who wanted to show the power of music and since the first workshops in regional places they just saw how beautiful and cathartic and needed these kinds of things were,” Claud said.

“We now run workshops all around regional and metro NSW, in youth justice centres, in crisis housing and with lots of different youth services working with 1000s of marginalised youth every year.

“We’ve received such amazing feedback from both the participants and also the staff and families and people around year after year and there’s just such a huge demand.”

Claud said creative workshops could be a positive way to engage with disconnected youth and to help them discover ways to express themselves.

“Some of them we find are in survival mode in their different situations, and they don’t really have necessarily the mental space or the capability in that period of their life to be creative,” they said.

“These workshops allow for them to access that part of themselves, and often, doing something like making a song about their life experiences is really cathartic, and it allows for it to come out in a creative way.

“Sometimes it can lead to these young people realising they want to pursue a creative career and the workshops are the first introduction.”

While Heaps Decent began with music, Claud said the creative umbrella was becoming broader and they would work with local artists Georga Cameron and Sarah Wilson.

“We definitely have our roots in music, both in DJing and music production, but we’ve also moved towards visual arts, and that can be more traditional art or we also do multimedia and animation,” they said.

“The visual arts component is quite wide and diverse but it’s been great because it means that if some kids aren’t interested in music and they are more visual, then we can give them the option of doing either.”

With technology evolving at an unprecedented pace and artificial intelligence casting a long shadow over the future of the creative industries, Claud said it was something they wanted to tackle head-on.

“In these Wagga workshops we’re playing with this idea of ‘future creating’ and looking at how it is challenging and also learning about how AI and human creativity can interact,” they said.

“We’re going to create different works with human creativity and then we’re going to also generate it with AI and, really, we don’t want people to be scared of AI; we’ve got to understand how it interacts.”

Claud said the team was looking forward to returning to Wagga where they had been working for some time.

“We have actually been doing these workshops in this region since we started in 2008 and we have worked a lot with the community and with the Curious Rabbit,” they said.

“The workshops are free, yeah, which is always great, and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes out of them!”

The workshops will be held on 1 and 2 October at the Curious Rabbit for people aged 12 – 17 and you can learn more or book a spot here.