Equipped with notebooks and pens, children are invited to subvert the park around them, each constructing a world where an invented society has evolved bizarre adaptations to protect the young: an absence of gravity means adults tether children with strings; kids are earmuffed to block the call of sirens; and ice shoes allow safe passage across paths of lava. The children transform the familiar landscape into something strange, playful, and precarious.

The adult audience, with undeniable investment in how they read the experience of their distant child, hear snippets of live audio refracted through eavesdropping of their fellow adults’ potential thoughts.

Then when a mysterious Man arrives on a scooter and leaves a Child unattended in the park, subtle actions start to carry new weight. The private adult machinations we are hearing evolve into more fanciful and historical interpretations of this incident, including that the Child might actually be a changeling!

The children, immersed in their own ’paracosm’ and unaware of the adult audio, encounter this Child as an intriguing new presence. The Child seems to communicate with them through telepathic messages, which slips easily into the logic of their imagined worlds.

Adults watch as their children interact with this Child, as The Man and as the children begin to move together, donning hoods and being guided to participate in simple collective actions - hiding, emerging, gathering together. They become harder and harder to distinguish from each another, before being led away in a distant pied-piper-like procession. We adults are left for a moment with absence and uncertainty before from somewhere out of sight, we hear the unmistakable sound of our own child’s voice, calling out within the group and reassuring us from afar. Reunited soon after, the adults are invited to step into the worlds their children have created, where imagined dangers and absurd adaptations - whilst playful and illogical - might quietly resonate with the ways we respond to our fears today.

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Across time, humans have responded to uncertainty by developing stories, beliefs, and behaviours to make sense of fears. From Medieval dancing manias and cautionary tales, through contemporary anxieties about children’s physical safety and attention stolen by social media, children are often the victims of our well-intentioned attempts to protect them. Changelings does not take sides or present solutions. Instead, it plays with our inherited and adaptive narratives about children, inviting us to see these as collective, constructed, and (most importantly), changeable.