Album was developed as part of the Exchange for Change programme and was presented on the Festival Day, 30 June 2011.
A Note from the Director:
During the process of creating this piece, our consultation was with a group of 11 to 12 year olds from George Green’s School – they were our inspiration. Before meeting them, we shared who we are as artists, exchanging something of our processes.
We all experienced the magic and the privilege of stepping into each other’s creative shoes, viewing the world from different perspectives. It’s a gift and a challenge to create work for young people and this age band seems complex – straining towards early adulthood, yet remaining firmly attached to the umbilical cord of childhood. What kind of theatre would 11 to 12 year olds like to see? What do we remember about being 11 and are our recollections relevant to 11 year olds in 2011? We were trying to pin down the elusive ‘X’ factor of the 11 year old experience. But just like capturing a butterfly and pinning it down, by fixing the ‘truth’ we thought we knew about being 11, we risked distorting it and twisting it into a stereotype. A phrase used by Kayo – “the present moment is an indeterminate place” – became the axis of our investigation. We recalled the children’s responses to images and words, the surprise discovery of creating memory through other people’s images, the internal and external spaces they occupy in their individual migrations. So what we present are fractured narratives – reflections of what a certain place meant at a certain time – sometimes distorted and confusing, sometimes weird, sometimes maybe even funny.
Album. Memory. Migration.