In making The Forest, Fevered Sleep’s new work for children, the company’s artistic director David Harradine spent a lot of time wandering around one with a group of inner-city schoolchildren “getting lost, gathering things and seeing how the children behaved and reacted to it. As a London-based company and a London-based person, we meet a lot of children that often have never seen these settings and I was interested in how a performance piece could conjure it for them.”

The result is something “very movement-based, with a lot of images and sounds, a combination of real things such as trees and conkers and pine cones and more abstract pieces that capture the essence of a forest – how it moves and what it sounds like.”

The natural world is a fascination to Fevered Sleep. At 2008’s Brighton Festival, they explored the quality of light in the city in An Infinite Line. In the same year, they also toured Brilliant, a theatre piece for children about the magical imaginings and deep emotions that emerge when we sleep. In 2010, they will present Freeze, a response to landscapes of snow, frost and ice.

While very different in form, David says both The Forest and its predecessor were “very much about a non-verbal performance, not based in language but in images, feelings and sensations. I think that so much of the work that’s made for children, whether on TV or theatre-based, is just bright and fast and colourful and it’s got a certain kind of quality which I see over and over again. Children love that, of course, but I think they are also really connected to things that are subtle and detailed and magical.”

Brilliant was part of a trilogy of pieces for a young audience, which also included And The Rain Falls Down, which celebrated the intensity of pleasure and play that comes from bathing, and Feast Your Eyes, a modern fairytale about food.

All the work the company makes for children begins, David explains, by working with them and trying to understand how they play “because that’s often the way they learn about the world. But it’s not about trying to work out what they would do or think – every person, whether an adult or child is so different. It’s more trying to reconnect with a spirit of playfulness and way of looking at the world that feels childlike”.

He hopes audiences will be surprised and delighted by the piece, that they “will turn up expecting a certain kind of thing and then be surprised that this is quite different and, even though it’s different, they still enjoy it and are engaged by it. I’d also be really happy if by the end of it a child said, “Can we go to visit a forest?”. I’d like it to inspire people to explore nature and discover how brilliant it is.”

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