90 Minutes to find you - Time keeps The Drummer in Brighton
Time Keeps The Drummer by Alice Underwood
Time Keeps The Drummer by Winnie Yeung
The show is confirmed. Time Keeps The Drummer will be part of the Brighton Festival in May. Now begins the work of finding our company. We’re looking for 12 children with little or no previous experience, up for the task of becoming part of a tight company of performers with less than 2 weeks of preparation time with us, the 2 directors plus a movement director. It’s a big ask for the children, and for the parents and carers.
They wait with their adults outside the audition room, the big open space of The Dome Foyer bar hosting a fizzing mix of nerves energy giddiness reluctance and anxiety. We work, as always to make them all feel welcome, and to ease any worries, giving a warm reassurance to them and their carers that the next 90 minutes will be a fun and gentle encounter with us.
We just need to meet you, we just need to find out who you are beneath all the formality of an audition, and all the unnatural layers we build up around us as protection when turning up to an unknowable experience with some strangers.
Did you really want to come? (Or did a parent really want you to come?!) Do you know what the show is and or even why you’re here? Do you want to be in this show? - across the years of hosting similar workshops set up to meet potential performers, most do know what they’ve come to do, but there’s always a handful who turn up joyfully ignorant!
We have 90 minutes to play and dance and hang out together. To learn your names, and for you to learn ours. We have our tricks to settle you into the rhythm of the workshop; we are sometimes playful and clownish in our explanations and our directions. We understand how anxiety shows up. We welcome neurodivergence. We open up space for surprises. We know how to spot a child with a quieter disposition. We’re drawn to the whispering power in smallness, shrinking back and trying not to be seen, but we see you.
Who are you in this group, in this game, in this circle, in this dance, in this improvisation. Are you happy in this kind of space? Can you listen? Can you be open to the unexpected? Can you let us see you?
Who is it we’re hoping to invite into our Brighton company? What exactly are we looking out for? We need 12 ‘ordinary’ children. (we know there’s no such thing). Ordinary is shorthand for children who wouldn’t necessarily have received performance training or who have much experience of being on stage - we want to bring together children from a range of backgrounds, we love to co create with children for whom everything about the experience of making and performing a show is brand new, because the fundamental essence of a Fevered Sleep show featuring anyone, either professional adult performers or children, is that we don’t want the performers to actually ‘perform’ at all, and this can be hard to comprehend or to unlearn if you’ve already been learning to do just that. We’re not looking to create a piece of performative ‘childness’, we need you to be just entirely yourselves, unmasked, unapologetic, perfect imperfect humans.
We have 90 minutes to find you, which is never enough time to really get to know you, but we’ve learned that it’s ample time to want to know more.