Navigating Globalisation

This interdisciplinary project uses dance, drama, and digital arts to find innovative ways to listen to young people’s ideas, respond to their feelings and co-create new imaginative work.

Our co-created student output exploring globalisation is shared below for use in your classrooms and workshop spaces.

These creative outputs are not designed to be examples of perfect, polished performances, rather, they capture the messiness and unfinishedness of our creative process. Contained within each of the digital films is a series of provocations that we hope will inspire others to act.

Using our video resources with the PDF RESOURCE PACK provides extra content and ideas for your workshops.

As with any devising project, it is difficult to completely unravel all the threads that have been woven together to create the final piece. Within our Earth Stories project, these young people created this dystopian music video out of several different activities and student-led research.

We explored some big, tricky concepts relevant to the climate emergency and environmental issues by questioning:

• How are we all interconnected both locally and globally?

• How can we ‘map’ ourselves and show our connections to each other and places around the world?

• In what ways has the pandemic made us feel differently about travelling?

Later in our rehearsal process, we began to question how places and everyday objects interconnect locally and globally. We asked:

• How do everyday items such clothes, fruit, chocolate, and flowers travel around the world?
• Have we ever considered the different journeys they take to arrive in our supermarkets and shops?
• What impact does what we consume have on the environment?
• How have some of these industries tried to adapt and become more sustainable/environmentally friendly?

During our rehearsals, we explored how messy and complex all of this is – none of us have the ‘answers’. In our dystopian music video below, the choreography used both rule-bound movement and chance encounters, creating a chaotic scene of global flows and exchanges. We played with creating a ‘party/dance-like’ atmosphere to provoke questions about the dark, hedonistic pleasure of consumerism and question the problematics of positioning youth as ‘the answer’ to the climate emergency.