Come and go as you please at Brighton Festival show
You can come in when you want. You can leave when you want. You can stay for as long as you like. And that's the whole point.
Fevered Sleep are pushing back against conceptions of linear time and clock time as they bring Time Keeps The Drummer to the Brighton Festival from May 8-10 at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange.
It comes promised as a wild experiment where theatre, dance, installation and improvisation collide, a five-hour performance which invites you to experience time on your own terms.
Performed by 12 children and a single adult percussionist, it’s absolutely not specifically a children’s show, says Fevered Sleep company co-artistic director Samantha Butler.
“It is for children. It is for families. It is for everyone.”
The idea is to slow down and experience time differently – a show for adults who are interested in contemporary experimental work, but also a show for children and families who are seeking out bold new experiences. The performance evolves over five hours, unfolding as a unique and unrepeatable experience, directed live and shaped in real time.
“It's a show but it's like a combination of performance art and contemporary dance. It has images and it has music and it has lighting. It's a bit of a mish-mash and it is five hours long but the most important thing is that you don't have to come for the full five hours. You can drop in and you can drop out.
“The whole thing is about time and so we thought we would extend that time to the show itself. It is 12 children and a drummer who improvises. Wherever we do the show there are local children. We find children that are not necessarily performers, hopefully not performers.
“We have been making shows with children for years and years and years, and what we love about making shows with children is their rawness, their natural state of being, the fact that they are entirely themselves. We work hard to make sure that they throw off the structures of the present and that they are themselves. Within those five hours you will see those children entirely in their own personalities.
“We only have the children for 12 days, and a large part of the preparation is inviting them to be an ensemble together. It's about learning to work as a group and to understand the space and time and sensitivity to whatever is going on on the stage. Aside from that they spend a lot of time working with the movement director. There is a lot of choreography and contemporary dance, but also quite a lot of them are able to improvise.
“There's nothing rigid about it. We're pushing back against rigidity and pushing back against time as a linear thing. It's about flexibility and responsiveness and about what occurs to them in the moment.
“We hope that people would take the invitation to come whenever they want and stay however long they want, and we want them to tap into this idea that allows for experimentation and play and rest. We want adults to hark back to the freedom to play.”