PRESENTED BY TAKE ME SOMEWHERE & PLATFORM
NICOLA GUNN (Australia):
WORKING WITH CHILDREN
PLATFORM, GLASGOW directions
Fri 22 May 2020
CANCELLED
ACCESS: This performance will be BSL interpreted. All TMS venues are wheelchair accessible.
WORKING WITH CHILDREN is a choreographed essay that looks at the problem of intimacy and exposure by exploring the nature of performance and the curiosity of artists who make contemporary performance with children for an adult audience. Performed with a different group of children each time, whose only rehearsal consists of two 2-hour workshops prior to the performance, it is an attempt to perform a kind of radical and joyful vulnerability. With a seemingly unconnected collection of anecdotes that spin around a central core without ever naming it, the audience is invited to wonder about the effect of language on the body as five children learn choreography live in front of them. Through this accumulation of purposeless movements that are slowly built up and pieced together and a tangential, divergent monologue with vaguely orbiting ideas about appropriateness, shame, what we look to protect children from, ethics, empathy and imagination, language and power, there is created a tension between the children’s live copying, the authority of the artist and the audience’s gaze. The work plays with the idea that we can find a different way of behaving by finding a different way of inquiring and of listening.
Written, Directed and Choreographed by NICOLA GUNN
Performed by NICOLA GUNN and FIVE CHILDREN
Sound Composition and Design by DUANE MORRISON
Lighting Design by THOMAS BRUVIK
Video Design by MARTYN COUTTS and NICOLA GUNN
“Nicola Gunn’s Working With Children deals a final, gorgeous blow. This is the dessert of performance – layered, rich and silly like a trifle ... things emerge out of this quite simple, formal structure to produce joy and surprise... It’s masterfully assembled”
“The strands are mesmerisingly many. In a miraculous feat, Gunn weaves a thick narrative out of them, in which minute observations of life, descriptions of the legalities of making theatre with children and some wild guesses about perfect strangers come together into a layered question about ethics: what are we trying to protect children from, and who decides? ...Working with Children is a mature work of an artist who has defined her terms.”
Working with Children is co-produced by BIT Teatergarasjen, Rosendal Teater and Carte Blanche. Working with Children was originally commissioned and produced by Melbourne Theatre Company with Performance Space. The first development season was presented in the Lawler Studio in Melbourne in September 2018 and at Liveworks Festival in Sydney in October 2018