Building opportunities for profound participation and playful co-operation in interactive dance theatre for diverse young audiences

This paper draws on my experience as Artistic Director of Fully Booked Theatre, a company which creates interactive dance theatre for children to investigate how we can begin to create the conditions for profound participation and playful co-operation in the creation and performance of interactive works. For our latest piece, Once Upon a Wall, we are working with Priory Woods, a school that provides an inclusive education for pupils with severe learning difficulties and those with profound and multiple needs.

In her paper, Culture for or by the Child, Katya Johanson says children have sometimes been seen as a social threat, in need of discipline and constraint, or as vulnerable people in need of our protection. Diverse audiences in particular can be seen as vulnerable. This description contextualizes children in terms of the behaviour they require from us as adults rather than putting the focus on the children themselves. With our work at Priory Woods, we explored ways in which it might be possible to create interactive theatre that puts the children at the centre of the process, creating a performance that is made for their culture and aesthetic values and that treats them as beings – the present tense of themselves - rather than the adults they may someday become.