How High The Sky

Developed with the assistance of the Arts Centre.

How High The Sky is an immersive interactive theatrical experience for babies and their carers. Using a striking design principle, live sound capture technology and an appealing object-based story, we will develop a multi-sensory performance which aims to re-frame the unique relationship between a parent and their new child. How High The Sky is currently in creative development and will premiere in 2012.

How High The Sky invites adult reflection on the child’s unique view of the world. A shared journey is at first mediated by parents for their children – a familiar role – before the adults are invited to momentarily release this leadership, and allow the child’s impulses to guide their experience.

THE EXPERIENCE
An intimate audience of 12 babies, each with an accompanying adult, enters an illuminated, circular space, with walls made of suspended plastic strips. This architectural structure hangs like a giant mobile from the roof. The soft, yielding walls respond naturally to the movement of the participants as they take their own time to navigate along a spiral pathway.

They encounter text and objects above, below and around them which make up a simple narrative, encouraging communication from parent to child. A directional speaker system creates an immersive, surprising sound design which has an immediate relationship to image and action. The pathway leads to a calm inner sanctum where the children are placed on a soft floor, which becomes the infants’ auditorium. Here, a performance of sound, image and light takes place in the space above them. This story, shared on their entrance, is re-told to them in a ‘narrative of atmosphere’ operated by 2 performers. Objects move and morph above the infants, refracting light and eliciting sounds. In a non-confronting separation of baby and parent, the parents observe their children from a standing position: seeing their wonder, focus, delight, laughter, curiosity and more.

The babies’ sonic responses are captured - delighted goos and sighs, exclamations, cries – and mixed live into an evocative sound design. The adults experience the pure and unmediated expression of their children along with the image of a circle of tiny humans. Then, at the gentle climax of the work, parents hear the rapidly beating heartbeats of the 12 infants, a striking metaphor for the fragility of new life and the miracle of a collective future.

ARTFORM EXPLORATION
The Role of the Audience
How High The Sky experiments with new forms by re-framing the role of the audience and drawing attention to the corresponding effects. In doing so, it explores the ‘dramaturgy of the audience’ – the concept that the participants are unique theatrical elements in the space, able to elicit meaning and affect the performance, and/or another’s experience of it. In shifting the traditional roles of performer and audience member, their experiences become fused within the work, so that their engagement irrevocably changes the performance. The infants become the subjects of the work, while deeply engaged in their own theatrical experience, rendering the audience simultaneously – and perhaps unknowingly – as performers, creators, passive observers and active participants.

In July 2010, a number of creative development workshops titled Theatre is Child's Play was supported by the Arts Centre and by a generous donation by Daniel and Danielle Besen through Polyglot’s Ambassadors’ Circle. View photos of the workshop in the 'Photo Gallery' tab below.

Commissioning partner: Full Tilt at the Arts Centre, Melbourne.
Research partner: Melbourne University, Centre for Artistic & Creative Education

For booking enquiries, please contact:
Simon Abrahams
Executive Producer
simon@polyglottheatre.com
+61 3 9827 9667