About How High The Sky

A circle of cupboard doors and drawers invites very young children and their adults to explore their contents. One cupboard is full of feathers. Another houses five red helium balloons taut on their strings. A drawer is full of toy planes that shift inside. With each opening a clear sound is heard, before the door gently closes itself. Each image conveys the visual contradiction of air-borne things trapped inside the cupboards. Another door opens and the audience enters the centrally enclosed performance space where they find a white, soft sculptured floor, and a projected blue sky high above them.

Lying on their backs on the cloud-floor, they see a story unfold overhead. All the images the audience have seen outside are characters in the story. A system of mobiles, pulley and slot mechanisms will be operated by two concealed performers and a live musician. The effect will be a contemplative experience for the audience, as if floating in the sky.

A plane zooms past, making a familiar sound. A cloud moves across the sky with the sound of wind. Then a feather wafts into view. But what sound does a feather make? This feather becomes the central character in a simple journey about familiar and unexpected objects in the sky. The narrative follows our feather as it is blown about by wind, leaves and amorphous shapes, and concludes with a visual explosion of feathers floating softly onto the audience, accompanied by sounds that children imagine a falling feather might make.

Themes and Structure

How High The Sky is a tactile interactive performance for children from birth to four years of age, which explores non-representational expression through young children’s instinctive vocal responses to visual stimuli. Each performance will feature the sound engineer’s live sampling of the sounds children make to represent the cupboards’ contents which will blend with a pre-composed soundtrack. Their responses will form a central part of the narrative, fuelling the final feather fall.

Process

2010 will see the initial concept and design stages of How High the Sky, in a commissioned development from the Arts Centre. A full creative development will take place in 2011, and we anticipate a premiere in 2012.

How High The Sky will also respond to a research project investigating the gap between instinct and learning; how learned response governs the instinctual and the notion of right and wrong in creative expression.

Credits

Commissioning partner: Full Tilt at the Arts Centre, Melbourne.
Research partner: Melbourne University, Centre for Artistic & Creative Education Key artists: Jessica Wilson and Sue Giles (co-directors/concept), Anna Tregloan (designer), David Franzke (sound designer), Andrew Livingstone (lighting designer),