CHANGELINGS

INFORMATION FOR GEELONG
ARTS CENTRE APPLICATION

MORE DETAILED PROJECT DESCRIPTION

CHANGELINGS is an immersive theatrical adventure, experienced through headphones, for children (7-11 years old) and their adults, set in large parks or botanic gardens and exploring how enculturated values influence decisions around childhood independence. Two audiences have very different experiences that reference each other as they unfold in parallel. Children are guided through an active process of world-building, whilst their adults observe them - often from a distance - in an encounter that blurs truth, socially constructed ideas and fanciful imaginings.

Equipped with notebooks and pens, children are invited to subvert the park around them, each constructing a world governed by entirely new rules. In these invented societies, bizarre adaptations have evolved to protect the young: without gravity adults tether children with strings; kid are earmuffed to block the call of sirens from the lake; 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, bringing an undeniable emotional investment to their reading of their own child, hear snippets of live audio about these playful constructions. This is refracted through eavesdropping of their fellow adults thoughts, as well as cultural and historical narratives about childhood. 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 through our headphones evolve into more fanciful interpretations of this incident, including that the Child might actually be a changeling!

For the children, however, the same incident unfolds differently. Immersed in their own acts of creation and unaware of the adult audio, they encounter The Child not as a threat, but 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 on as their children interact with this Child, as The Man reappears - first glimpsed at a distance as if searching, then addressing them directly - and as the children begin to move together, donning hoods and participating in simple collective actions - hiding, emerging, gathering.

When the children become harder and harder to distinguish from each another, and then are led away in a distant pied-piper-like procession, we are left for a moment with absence and uncertainty. Then, from somewhere out of sight, we hear the unmistakable sound of our 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 fear today.

R&D project in Darlington UK

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT NOW

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.

Changelings is deeply influenced by the urgent work of Johnathan Haidt’s in his book, ‘The Anxious Generation’, which identifies the ‘Anglosphere’ as uniquely protective and engaged in the constant supervision of its children, leading to a crisis of anxiety and an “evaporation of children from public spaces.”

The project’s concept emerges from years of practice research that has revealed that most children long for space to dream and imagine new realities without interruption. In Changelings the child audience is guided, free of a supervising adult, to actively embody an adventure of their own making. Their immersion takes place through the process of inventing their own private ‘paracosm’, rather than through being asked to imaginatively ‘buy-in’ to an adult-created fiction.

Changelings uses binaural audio including live recordings of the audience children's’ voices via a field mike, historical research, interviews from children in a range of cultural and ‘class’ contexts and live performance (one adult and one child recruited locally to play The Child and The Man), to offer intelligent and informed perspectives on the thematic territory.

Parks are oases - important habitats for the children who have graduated playgrounds but are not are not yet roaming independent teens. In some contexts, parks are the last remaining places where children can freely wander and dream without structure or confinement. With Changelings we want to transform these familiar places into living wonderlands, imprinting them with theatrical memories that can be held between children and their adults way beyond the experience of the work.