Navigating Globalisation

As with any devising project, it is difficult to completely unravel all the threads that have been woven together to create the final piece. These young people created this dystopian music video out of several different activities and student-led research (see our RESOURCE pack for more details of our creative process).

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.