Future Play
2010-2015
A four-year research project investigating the creation, presentation and touring of performance for children in the UK
In 2010 Fevered Sleep launched The Future Playground, an online community and series of annual gatherings of artists, producers, and funders, who came together to talk about art and performance for children, and how it might be created imaginatively, produced adventurously, and presented widely.
How artists’ wild ambitions might meet children’s wild imaginations, and how producers, funders, programmers and venues might create opportunities for this to happen.
In 2011, with support from Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we embarked on Future Play, a four-year research project that set out to investigate existing models for touring performance for children.
We wanted to discover how new collaborative relationships between artists, producing organisations, presenting venues and audiences might lead to new ways of thinking, new ways of working together, and new ways of touring.
The research took place alongside three touring shows (And The Rain Falls Down, The Forest and Dusk) that we presented across the UK between 2011 and 2014.
We published a booklet at the end of Future Play, which shares our learning. It’s best seen as a toolkit: a series of practical strategies, tactics, and things to do that can be extrapolated from the specific context of touring three Fevered Sleep projects, to the wider ecology of touring performance for children, and indeed beyond that to all touring, whoever the work is for. We still have a few hard copies of the booklet left – get in touch if you’d like one. Alternatively, you can also download the booklet as a PDF.
We hope that the insights we share and the approaches we suggest in the booklet will be useful, whether you’re an artist, a producer, a programmer or a venue manager, or any other advocate for brilliant art, and outstanding performance, for children.
We’re not describing a fixed way of working, and certainly not proposing one, not for ourselves nor for anyone else. What we share through Future Play is offered in the spirit of collaboration, common experience, and a collective ambition for change.
How do you create a new model for touring?
Supported By
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Arts Council England