A crack team of creative people has set about bringing children and young students on board the V18 train. Artistic programme director Paul Portelli tells David Schembri that Valletta 2018 belongs to us all.

One common misconception about Valletta 2018 is that in five years’ time the peninsular capital and its inhabitants will be basking in the European limelight, as the rest of the towns which don’t happen to be the capital of Malta look on in envy.

One thing I learnt while doing these workshops is that one should never underestimate a child’s imagination

However, a joint application by all Maltese localities under the bid for Valletta ensured that every village on the island was co-capital in this event.

“Valletta 2018 belongs to Valletta as much as it belongs to any other town and village in Malta and Gozo. This is an opportunity for us to take stock, to have a good, hard look at where we’re at and then to move forward from there together,” Paul Portelli, an artistic programme director within the Valletta 2018 Foundation, says.

The success of the project will depend on how many people from all over the country are willing to join in: “Valletta 2018 belongs to all band clubs and groups active at local level as much as it belongs to the Manoel Theatre, St James Cavalier and other national cultural institutions. We are all partners on the same journey,” Portelli says.

While the joint application required some persuasion and a sizeable amount of signatures to make V18 belong to all the inhabitants of Malta and Gozo on paper, making this happen in reality is hard work.

Which is precisely what Portelli, Malcolm Galea and Joseph Zammit are doing, as they have just finished touring schools round the islands with Capital Games, a workshop tailored to inform and fire the imagination of schoolchildren on Malta’s culture capital status in a few years’ time.

“We need to establish a strong presence in each and every town and village if we want all people of good will to come aboard with us. Schools are the perfect, most natural vehicle for us to reach out to the public,” Portelli says.

Ownership is useless unless one knows it exists. “Our first strategy is mainly an information blitz, a campaign reaching out to as many students as possible, to inform and to generate interest and excitement. During these sessions, we have a bit of a play with the concepts and themes; ‘imagination’, ‘barriers’, ‘city’, ‘capital’ and ‘culture’. We hope to reach all year four, five and six students at primary level by the end of the next scholastic year,” Portelli says.

Experience has shown the information blitz to have been a good move. “In most cases, the majority of children wouldn’t know what V18 is until we tell them about it,” Galea says, noting there were exceptions where teachers had prepared their students beforehand.

“Having said that, there is always a handful of children who would already know and as time passes this percentage of children is increasing.”

Zammit concurs: “As of late, the children from the majority of schools we visit would already have a basic idea of the project, which shows that this event is being spoken of in the classrooms already. The idea is being spread across schools, and we show up to give them a workshop so that they would know all the details and encourage them and excite them to be part of it.”

At the start of the year, Galea teamed up with writer Trevor Zahra to prepare a workbook to go with the workshops he had designed the previous years – in which the schoolchildren can write their own ideas, the best of which will then be presented in a report.

“One thing I learnt while doing these workshops is that one should never underestimate a child’s imagination,” Zammit says.

“There was one child who came up with a very detailed plan of a water pistol fight in Valletta, where special tokens can be found in the city which could be used to buy or upgrade weapons and armour. It’s a crazy and complicated idea, but if it were to happen, it would result in being quite a spectacular event,” he says.

“Some of my favourites include the Fun Lab, Trampoline Disco, Valletta Waterfight Day, Ghost Museum, Children’s Books by Children, Qubbajd Ice Cream and the Sweet-Dispensing Helicopter,” Galea reports.

The workshops form part of a three-pronged strategic approach. The second strategy is to have an online environment on valletta2018.org, whereby the foundation will be uploading material from schools at random to the website, thus encouraging them to visit the website where, eventually, their work would be uploaded.

The third part of the strategy focuses on nurturing performers. “We will work both within existing structures in secondary schools or by setting up new groups to create opportunities for students to train and learn, especially in areas that are still relatively uncharted here, like circus training and outdoor art and performance,” Portelli says.

Directing the work at the children and teenagers of today is directing it at the teenagers and adults of 2018, who will be the ones who are likely to benefit the most from the legacy of Valletta 2018 – and their understanding of what being the European Capital of Culture implies is crucial for this.

“It’s the schoolchildren who stand to gain the most from V18,” Galea says. “We let the kids know that despite its name, V18 isn’t just Valletta and isn’t just for one year. In fact, many of the V18 events will begin before 2018 and for the endeavour to be deemed successful these events need to be able to keep developing for long after V18 is done and dusted, so as to increase Malta’s cultural contribution.

“Many schoolchildren would be on the foothills of adulthood by then and about to decide what direction they want their lives to take,” Galea says.

“In our workshops we tell the children that this project will open new doors so that anything relating to culture and arts could be considered as a profession.

“They are part of a new generation, a fresh mentality, and this project will enable them to be part of the future cultural scene in Malta and strengthen the community.

“Valletta 2018 is about who we are, our showcase, not only about the performing arts; it’s about legacy, not merely a fancy, grand year-long arts festival; it’s not a funding body or a cash cow, and it’s a process that has already begun,” Portelli says.

“It’s about Europe as much as it is about us.”

Clips from Capital Games in schools around Malta and Gozo can be seen on the Valletta 2018 Foundation’s You Tube page.

www.youtube.com/Valletta2018