Join us at the Chats (Fun) Palace!

Our bar will be open from 10 am – 4 pm, with tea / coffee, biscuits, and board games available. All workshops and the exhibition on the day are free! Just grab your ticket so we have a better idea of numbers, and get creative with us or hang out in our Library bar with friends and family 🎲

Schedule

• In the morning (10:30 am - 12:30 pm), our friends at @change_act_theatre will be running an inclusive, relaxed introduction to the Theatre for Social Change approach, using drama games and participatory theatre exercises to explore experiences, communities, and social impact. Change, Act! Theatre are an experienced Disabled and Neurodivergent-led Applied Theatre company who co-create projects with local Disabled and Neurodivergent Communities and perspectives at the forefront.
• In the afternoon (1 pm - 4 pm), Tristan from @londonzinescene will be facilitating a zine-making workshop incorporating digital culture and materials. There is an appetite for curating the unseen screenshots, photos, and image chaos that lurk on our devices. Zines allow for cognitive offloading and the ability to reveal ourselves and our digital world in a tactile way. Can we turn memes into zines to print and share? Participants will be able to use a free online ZINE MAKER app and portable printer. Tristan is a graphic designer and creative director with more than a decade in the creative industries, a recent fellow from Newspeak House, London College of Political Technology, and a member of faculty on the London School of Solarpunk.
• Throughout the day, have a wander through our corridor and celebrate 50 years of Chats Palace's history in the community. It features unseen images by local photographer Neil Martinson from the first Hackney Marsh Fun Festival in 1974 up to images from the last ever Hackney Carnival in 2024.

About FUN PALACES:
Fun Palaces is an ongoing campaign for community at the heart of culture and culture at the heart of every community. In 1961 the renowned theatre director Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price designed a Fun Palace building – a ‘laboratory of fun’. They imagined a building linked through technology to other spaces, accessible to those who wouldn’t normally go to arts venues or great centres of learning (which is the same concept that inspired the naming of Chats Palace!). Fun Palaces supports local people to co-create their own cultural and community events, across the UK and worldwide, sharing and celebrating the genius in everyone.