Imagine meeting your grandchild, or your great grandchild, when they are the same age as you are now. Only you're your age too. What would you say to them? What would they say to you?
‘Descendants’ hopes to answer those questions by bringing to life all our tomorrows today.
Kilter makes life-affirming future-focussed theatre born out of the real-life experiences of the real-life people we work with. For 'Descendants', we will be running a series of free creative workshops to understand what the 2012 British public expect the world to have in store for the next couple of generations.
We will seek to reach a wide range of participants and from this pool of knowledge, experience and imagination we will choose 3 people to work with closely. We will visit these 3 people in their homes and get to understand their family backgrounds; we will record their day-to-day activities and interrogate the far-flung corners of their future imaginings. And we will create 3 characters – as close to accurate as possible, the 3 direct descendants of our new friends.
And when the research and development is over and the script-writing and re-writing is done and the rehearsals have been finely tuned to an impeccable performance standard, then we'll introduce our 3 new friends to you live 'on-stage'. And then they can introduce you to their descendants and you can judge for yourselves their 3 very different futures.
‘Descendants’ will be a 90-minute 3-act play with each act set in a separate non-traditional performance space on a different specific date in the future. Audiences will promenade between the sites to witness each in an astonishingly plausible but surprising unravelling of the site's life to come.
As with all our work, audiences will experience a "point-blank" proximity to fully-rounded future-based characters. In an easy non-threatening style that Kilter practitioners have evolved over 10 acclaimed productions, audiences will be subtly enrolled into a specific relationship with each character in a process which sharpens every sense and reaction. Previous audiences of Kilter’s work have been profoundly affected by the experience and report long-standing impacts on their day-to-day interpretation of the world.
The show will be designed to help our audiences cast a light into the darkness of the future. Each audience member will experience a unique journey through the performance event, making their own set of exciting discoveries and intrigues through their own choices and chances. For each person that leaves a performance of ‘Descendants’, a light will fall on someone they recognise in the future. It is our sincere hope that it is someone they are happy to travel towards with their head held high and their arms open wide. If it’s not, we hope they’ll want to know why.
Over the last 5 years Kilter has received an abundance of accolades for our pioneering approach to tackling pressing environmental and social issues through site-specific theatre around Bath & Bristol. In 2012, we feel compelled to create a piece of work that can build on this reputation and be seen and enjoyed more widely than ever before. Although 'Descendants' will respond to the landscape in which it is originally set, it will be a highly adaptable piece of work, designed to flourish in whatever space and time available. It will work in theatres and festivals, indoors and outdoors, with small or large audiences. One character will stand alone, a second will compliment it. After 3 have been carefully crafted, the model of work allows for more and more.
We would really appreciate any support you can give this project. As we are all painfully aware, these are not easy times for arts funding and we are donating our own time as practitioners in recognition of that fact. Thanks to our low-carbon ethics and insistence on re-used & recycled props & costumes, a little donation to Kilter's 'Descendants' really will go a long way.
And they're your descendants too. They are your future. You are their history. Make it a good one!
