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IfYouComeDownToTheParkTonight is a globe-spanning project which explores cultural norms around child safe-guarding in different regions and their impact on children’s agency in the public domain.
Small urban parks are both subject and setting for the headphone-experienced performance work for 8–12 year-olds and their adults.
Remembered incidents, urban myths, children’s stories, and filmic references (all collected via interviews around the world) will be supported by a rich cinematic soundscape and moments of live action role play (LARPing) in this completely immersive theatrical experience.
Local parks stand out in our cities as oases – the last environments where kids have permission to safely wander, connect with nature and meet others of their kind. But the local park is not perfect. It can be boring for contemporary kids, particularly after they graduate from the ‘kid-zone’ (swings and slides). And at night, children are forbidden, because stuff hides in the shadows and the oasis is seen as a danger-zone belonging to grown-ups.
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Jessica and UK artist Olivia Furber are in the early stages of development for this project which seeks to reclaim local parks as places of independent roaming, child-led imagination and child agency - crucial habitats for urban children. They are assembling an international team of theatre-based artists who will work with children local to their own places. Michaela Gramajo (Mexico) and Janis Znotis (Latvia) are the first to join the project!
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When the audience are instructed to move through their local park after dark, story-like actions and images emerge from the real world as if they have dwelled unnoticed for generations. At first the adult/child pairs share ambient music, and the park appears to be empty. We hear the trope-like squeaking swing as we gaze at the playground. Then the sound suggests the presence of children, or maybe animals - somewhere.
From behind a tree - a solo wandering child - we hear their meandering thoughts. Or are those thoughts our own? Then we are instructed to play a pair of foxes and are immersed in a myth like narrative. But when our child receives different instructions, and our audio meddles with how we ‘read’ what they are doing, parental instinct is brought to our experience.
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The project will involve working with artists and children in five countries, as well as the development of partnerships with key presenters and advocacy organisations that are part of the international place-making movement for children. If you are interested in getting involved, please reach out to us.​
WHY WE ARE MAKING THIS WORK
The pioneering Bogota major Enrique Penalosa famously said that the health of a city is measured by the health of its children. But whilst multiple cities like his are implementing strategies to protect unaccompanied children from violence, children in the first world have become so ‘supervised’ that they are never seen alone in our streets at all.
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Across just one generation the play-based childhoods which saw kids navigating their neighbourhoods together have completely disappeared. The streets which were once owned by children are now ruled by cars and our home-bounded children rely on screens to socialise, leading to an unprecedented crisis in their mental health.
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Public health researchers and social psychologists such as Jonathon Haidt are connecting this loss of independent outdoor play with the ballooning crisis in children’s anxiety, depression and self-harm. Interestingly despite children in many countries using mobile phones, the data shows a mental health crisis mainly across the ‘Anglosphere’. Our English-speaking countries have stronger planning and policy directions focusing on safeguarding, protection and the removal of kids from the public domain. Wandering kids have become synonymous with neglect, playing into class and culture-based judgements of parenting which further entrenches our withholding of children from the public domain.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Lead Artists: Jessica Wilson (Australia) & Olivia Furber (UK)
Collaborating artists: Michaela Gramajo (Mexico) & Janis Znotis (Latvia)
Photo: Gerard Assi
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