Playground, a new world order

In the playground we remember the games we used to play, the worlds we imagined we would inhabit and the people we imagined we would be. With a childish sense of abandon, we attempt to go back to simpler times, a heroic place where we only exist for each other, and the world only exists for us.

Site – Inside and Out

Anti Playground, a new world order was originally commissioned as a site responsive tour of a children’s playground as part of Anti Contemporary Arts Festival in Kuopio, Finland. The research for this work was collected in over many months in numerous playgrounds across Melbourne and Europe and it was then performed outside in the Uppo Nalle children’s park. In this time we discovered that playgrounds are busy places; children play endlessly; enacting stories, encountering conquests and teetering on the edge of disaster. In the playground amongst the tumbling, falling, colliding narratives they are the heroes and this is their world.

For Playground a new world order we have brought the playground inside to the cobble stoned floors of the Meat Market. This is a place of fiction, summoned from our earliest memories of tyre castles, old wooden bridges and seas of tan bark. In bringing the playground into the world of the performance the work has taken on a new dimension. We cannot ask you to return to the playgrounds you once knew, you are different now, and so under these artificial lights, in this silent room together we will create another world with new beginnings and complex possibilities. In this world we have redefined the boundaries of the games we used to play and in changing the rules ever so slightly we are unravelling a heroic quest in an attempt to grab hold of the past while we rush into the future.

“Once more unto the breech dear friends….”