Dream Big Festival, Drill Hall, Adelaide
22 – 31 May, 2019
Adelaide 2019
This was Of All The People In All The World‘s third visit to the beautiful city of Adelaide but this time it was in an exciting new context. Back in 2007 producer Susannah Sweeney saw the show when it as in the city’s Botanical Gardens as part of Womadelaide. Although she loved the piece what excited her more was that her young son was engrossed in it too.
Years later as Creative Producer of DreamBIG Children’s Festival Susannah remembered that encounter and it prompted her to commission the first version of the show made especially for children. We were set up in city’s Drill Hall a great venue with a shiny dark wooden floor, a strong history and a huge parade ground outside for school coaches to pull up on.
The festival’s incredible outreach team had arranged a constant flow of school groups booked tightly into punchy time slots so every weekday almost all day the hall was swarming with children or a variety of ages but top end primary school. We used a simple prompt of four questions to set the students off looking around the exhibition thinking about it and discussing it. The questions were:
What piles are you represented in?
What piles are you not in that you would like to be in?
What piles are you not in that you would like to be in?
What piles do you think are missing?
We organised the installation as if it were a simple map of Australia with the populations of all the biggest cities measured out around the hall. Then we built thematically from these always remembering who our audience were whilst making sure not to ‘dumb the show down’. Of course we also left lots of space for lots of children to sit and walk and dump their bags. We were aided by a fantastic team of local artists.
There is a blog post about building this version of the show here.
Highlight it was very satisfying every time a teacher came up to us and pointed out a topic the students were currently studying illustrated in the show and marvelling at how clear it made things for them, however the real highlight was the visitors reactions to a statistic showing the vast number of people who logged on simultaneously to see a Marshmello concert within Fortnite.
Credits
Performers: Jack Trow, Laura Wynter, James Yarker
With: Rebecca Mayo and other local help.
Concept: James Yarker
General Manager: Laura Killeen
Executive Producer: Roisin Caffrey