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BE NOT AFEARD…<br />
A MULTISENSORY PERFORMANCE OF THE TEMPEST<br />
We spoke to writer/director/performer Julia<br />
Collar about Be Not Afeard: A Sensory Telling<br />
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a fully inclusive<br />
Brighton Fringe show for young people who<br />
are between 0-7 years old developmentally, and<br />
children with special educational needs.<br />
The Tempest is such a lovely story, if you<br />
want to do a Shakespeare story with early years,<br />
it’s a great place to start. Great characters, great<br />
setting, it’s got the magic in it, the humour in<br />
it and it is inherently sensory. It has a beautiful<br />
speech in there by Caliban about how the island<br />
is full of strange and weird sounds, but there’s no<br />
need to fear them.<br />
There are two performers who multi-role.<br />
We’ve looked at the show and thought, if you<br />
were two or three years old, what would be the<br />
main things you’d want to know about The Tempest?<br />
It’s very loose, it’s about exploring a magical<br />
island and encountering people on it, and having<br />
that key section with Caliban.<br />
Around 15% of our audiences will have some<br />
kind of need, so the majority is typically developing<br />
children. But all of these messages are<br />
applicable because we’re underscored by early<br />
years and mental health specialism. Every child<br />
needs these messages about how you regulate,<br />
how you handle big feelings, how you cope with<br />
anxiety, how you look to your grown up and<br />
your grown up looks to you to get through difficult<br />
experiences.<br />
We’ve set a lot of it to music because understanding<br />
the rhythm of Shakespeare and the<br />
beauty of the language is much easier if you put it<br />
to music. Things like Prospero’s speech about “we<br />
are such stuff that dreams are made on”, we’ve<br />
turned into a lullaby. We’re trying to make sure<br />
that as much as possible we are using lines from<br />
the text, but pared back and accompanied with<br />
Makaton to reinforce the meaning of key words.<br />
We’ve got some live painting as part of the<br />
activities. We also have a little flotilla of boats<br />
that children can get into if they want to: they<br />
can stand and make the sails, they can tip water….<br />
They can do whatever they want or they<br />
can sit back and watch it unfold. So you’ve got<br />
lots and lots of different ways you can be curious,<br />
but comfortable with your curiosity.<br />
As told to Joe Fuller<br />
9-12 <strong>May</strong>, various times, The Warren
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