Tak Takut Kids Club
About Tak Takut Kids Club
Tak Takut Kids Club: Holding (Safe) Space
Marc Nair
It is Friday evening in Boon Lay. People are hurrying home for dinner, tired after another week at work. Most pass by the common corridor with barely a glance into the two units that are occupied by Tak Takut Kids Club (TTKC).
This evening is particularly busy. In the maker space, lovingly called Big TTKC, a table filled with youth of various ages are carefully cutting out paper masks from a template. The masks are roughly feline in nature. They’ll start colouring and painting on them when they’re done.
The makerspace takes on the layout of an old 2-bedroom flat. The TTKC community uses the space like a large family would in a small space, always making space for the individual while co-existing. Separated by a tall storage shelf, the ‘costume department’ is rattling away at the sewing machine. Tonight, it’s about making adjustments to a cosplay costume.
A few doors away, past a clinic and a laundromat, is the community kitchen. Amanda, a volunteer, is showing youth how to cut slabs of cheese to coat with breadcrumbs before dipping them in a frying pan to make cheese balls. The youth suggest food that they would like to cook weekly with Amanda when she comes on a Friday.
Just outside, Ziv is on a ladder, tacking up a large cloth to create a makeshift projector screen. He has just finished a dance mentoring session with a youth and is setting up for ‘Just Dance!’, a Nintendo Switch game. Since 2019, the game console has been the first ‘facilitator’ to have brought dance to TTKC.
Walk a little further past the playground and Jimmy, TTKC’s beloved community artist, is pulling a sheet taut between two trees and back-lighting it with a small spotlight that’s been rigged from multiple extension cords.
This evening’s entertainment is shadow puppets. A small crowd gathers to watch when it gets dark. The players move the hand-cut puppets about. There’s no script, so everything is improvised. But it isn’t about putting on a show with a story, it’s about the experience of watching shapes come alive in the dark, of capturing a kind of magic, something only fleetingly felt in camping trips or other in-between spaces. It is about possibilities.
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