Compton's Olympic Promenade Performance

The pupils began by looking in the LIFT Living Archive at documents and photos from an unusual performance, ‘The Urban Dream Capsule’, in which four men lived their daily lives in an Arding and Hobbs shop window in Clapham Junction.  What better starting point for challenging the pupils’ traditional ideas about theatre and thinking about how they might use their school’s more surprising places as a performance space?
 
Working with artists Sue Mayo, Dan Scott and Mia Harris, the pupils developed a challenging and fascinating interactive performance which would take place in different locations around the school building.  It would explore the euphoric moment of the Olympic announcement on the 6th July and the shock of the 7/7 bombings a day later. 

Pupils collected recordings of school members’ experiences to build a powerful audio-piece which you can listen to here, and worked on short scenes exploring different individuals’ reactions to the two contrasting events.  These became the culminating parts of a promenade which lead the audience on a trail around the school searching for the owner of a lost bag.  As the groups reassembled in the canteen different characters gradually emerged and performed amongst the audience to finally reveal the owners of the lost bags. 

All the pupils were involved in the production from start to end and each had a part to play either as performer, guide, sound technician or stage manager.  “It was great for them to get an insight into how a performance is put together and to complete a project that challenged the boundaries of their experience of performing.” (Zoe Merritt, School Drama teacher). 


“When you go to see a show you just see the finished product, what they want you to see … it’s interesting to see what goes on before the actual performance happens”

“The LIFT project makes you think of drama in a whole different way.  In drama you have to know scripts and stuff but this is different, you make your own scripts, it’s kinda cool.”

“In shows all you’ve got to do is act and do your lines, here you actually make the lines and create your own speech.”

The Compton School participants