Jessica Wilson discusses a recent development piece with Theatre Hullabaloo!
What would go through your mind if you saw a 7-year-old child walking along a city street – alone?
If you are anything like me, you would scan the landscape for a supervising adult, before asking yourself a multitude of questions about their potential safety.
In Japan it would barely register.
In the USA you would call the police!
Of course, it hasn’t always been like this. Most of us grew up roaming the streets, meeting with other kids, navigating our neighbourhoods and building the resilience that has underpinned our adult lives. There were few restrictions except getting home in time for dinner.
As society, we are doing everything in our power to protect children from harm, but we should not underestimate how much has been lost in the process.
Olivia Furber and I are artists who both create immersive theatrical experiences for children in open spaces. We have wanted to work together since we met 9 years ago at an ASSITEJ Directors forum in Germany. We share a drive to make unusual creative experiences outdoors that change the way audiences see the ordinary world around them.
Embarking on this first collaboration together, with the thematic of child autonomy, we found the work of Johnathon Haidt. In ‘The Anxious Generation’, Haidt uses longitudinal data to call out a crisis of child and teen anxiety alongside the “evaporation of children from public spaces”. He argues that the restrictive protections on children which began reducing child independent mobility in the 1990’s, preceded screen-use, and that without finding ways to return a degree of physical independence to kids, we will not see improvements in their mental health.
And most interesting to us, Haidt identifies this crisis as residing mainly in the ‘Anglosphere’, where we are uniquely protective – engaged in the constant adult supervision of children (whilst allowing free-rein online).
Now, I’m Australian and Olivia is English. Even though we are deep inside this ‘Anglosphere’, we didn’t previously know that this phenomenon was unique to our own counties. We agreed this was potent territory and decided to dig into the ‘enculturated’ values that underpin stronger fears for our children, and more action around safeguarding than in other parts of the world.
Miranda got the project moving with an invitation to Darlington to begin an artistic process. Then in April this year, joined by audio technologist Ross Flight, we spent an unbelievably productive week at Hullaballoo, emerging with a resonant concept for what may be radical new work.
It’s called Changelings, and for us, it begins a new ‘theatre of participation’. Children are guided via headphones to actively generate and collectively embody their own imaginative content as part of a theatre experience. For their adults observing, often from a distance, their own child’s actions become the subject of a simultaneous but very different experience – also guided by headphone audio.
Experimenting in South Park, there were a few exciting ‘penny-drop’ moments.
In one of our workshop activities, we equipped children with notebooks and pens and guided them to sit quietly on their own and re-imagine the park as a world where the rules completely change – where an invented society has evolved bizarre adaptations to protect its young. Every child easily transformed the familiar landscape into something strange, playful, and precarious; an absence of gravity means adults tether children with strings; kids are earmuffed to block the call of sirens in the park’s lake; and ice shoes allow safe passage across paths of lava.
Next, the kids took part in a series of fun activities including collecting important objects to making masks as part of their individual world, then hiding and emerging in collective actions using the park around them. The kids seemed to find this very fun, but interestingly when they were interviewed at the end about what part of the workshop they enjoyed the most, all except one said, they loved the private work with their notebook the most. A couple of them mentioned how they never get this type of uninterrupted imaginative time – they do drama and other structured creativity, but long for this type of open-ended space.
This is consistent with my own discoveries. I have been setting up situations where kids generate material whilst on a phone call with me whilst wandering, seemingly on their own, and away from the gaze or interference of any adults (including myself as an adult artist). Children have demonstrated increased capacity for creativity in this setting – way above anything I have experienced when working with kids in groups. My hypothesis here is that kids are programmed to please adults, so they find it easier to express their authentic creativity when allowed to drop into dreamy imaginative zone without a feeling of over-sighting.
Miranda insightfully had invited Dr Paige to this workshop. She’s a specialist in child private speech from the University of Leeds. She said she hadn’t ever observed kids developing ‘paracosms’ like they did in the workshop. Of course we all stared at her and asked, “what is a paracosm?” She explained it is fully fleshed out parallel world common in children’s imaginative development and usually developed in private by younger children.
We had intended the notebook activity as a way to generate material for our theatre work, but with the help of Page, realised the pithy finding here is not necessarily the content, rather it is the action of actually generating the material that becomes your private content. So, this has become the backbone of Changelings – kids will be guided to develop their own imagined world, then inhabit collective actions with the rest of the child audience using their own world as content. I like this because it feels like a very imaginatively active way to engage with an art experience – a way to push beyond the more passive engagement with adult constructed art.
Whilst the kids were engaged in their collective actions during the workshop, we interviewed their parents at a distance. With undeniable subjective investment influencing how they read their distant child’s experience, their thoughts and anxieties also revealed potent territory for a parallel audio work.
We hope this ‘theatre of participation’ will give both of our audiences a thrilling sense of immersion, using the agency of their own subjectivity as part of a dramatic arc. Parents are emotionally invested in their child’s experience, and kids are emotionally invested in their own ‘paracosm’. This simultaneous ‘buy-in’ is powerful and when scaffolded in the right way, could make for damn good theatre.
Changelings involves binaural audio, and particularly interesting experimentation with live field mikes that will enable the voices of the children to interject the adult thread with snippets of their rich imagined worlds.
The project is inherently global in its conception, involving a handful of secondary artists from around the world who will work locally with children, feeding in interviews and perspectives.
We are cognisant of how sensitive this material is, and that it will require a lot of research, consultation, and experimentation to get right. We are not interested in passing judgement, rather we want to explore the effect of the enculturated value system that we all have to raise our children inside of.
The week we spent in Darlington is one of the richest creative times of my career and I’m very optimistic that this work, which will take some time to make, will be a resonant and timely experience for audiences.
A massive thank you to Theatre Hullabaloo for bravely backing us and kicking off the journey. We are excited about the next chapter.
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