WE BUILT THIS CITY
18/04/2012 - 21/04/2012
Production Details
It’s not a play…it is play
Ever been intrigued by children who would rather play with the box than the toy that comes inside the box?
We Built This City celebrates the ingenuity and wild possibilities of children’s imaginations and takes playing with boxes to the extreme.
Guided by performers who act as construction workers and other hilarious characters, Auckland’s children will be placed in the role of architect, creator and performer to construct a magnificent metropolis in Aotea Square using thousands of cardboard boxes.
Each performance sees this created city evolve – buildings go up, are pulled down, redesigned, extended, walked through, jumped on and reconstructed; the participants make tunnels, archways, towers and labyrinths and stamp their mark on Auckland’s very own cardboard city.
Since its premiere in 2001, We Built This City has become one of Australia’s Polyglot Theatre’s most enduring works and a veteran of festivals worldwide, where over 30,000 children have participated in its many seasons, including the Royal National Theatre London, Macrobert Centre Stirling Scotland, Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Melbourne International Arts Festival, Draiocht Theatre Dublin, Awesome Festival Perth, Sydney Opera House, Esplanade Theatre Singapore, and Act3 Children’s Festival Singapore, always to critical and audience acclaim.
“Polyglot is a wonderful internationally renowned theatre company, they have toured everywhere from tiny country towns to the world’s leading arts centres and it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to experience some of their Polyglot magic” says Bronwyn Bent, Time Out Producer at THE EDGE. “We are very excited to bring We Built this City to Auckland and to offer an innovative and fun alternative for families to come together and build their own cardboard city in the April school holidays”
With music underscoring the action We Built This City is an interactive play space for families celebrating the simplicity and power of children’s imaginations. At the end of the season a final cityscape is built, using every box in the space. Then everyone joins in trampling the city down into a gloriously chaotic heap of cardboard rubble.
“New Zealanders are very proud of our clean green image and we love the idea of engaging children with the idea of sustainability and recycling” Says Craig Cooper Programming Manager at THE EDGE “No cardboard box will go un-recycled in the making of this fantastic city!”
In each place We Built this City has been presented, the host city’s unique aesthetic and personality unconsciously comes through in the building style of the participants. It is a fascinating reflection of immediate cultural recognition: in Sydney – bridges and iconic buildings, in Singapore – skyscrapers, in Melbourne – big houses and backyards, in Washington D.C. – monuments, what will it be in Auckland?
“Whilst We Built This City is pure fun on one level, its interactive and collaborative nature also points out how the urban environment contains many interconnected lives, finally emphasising the impermanence of everything around us when the installation is eventually crushed flat by its creators.” – London International Festival of Theatre.
We Built this City will be performed in
Aotea Square, THE EDGE
from 18 – 21 April
at 10.00am, 11.30am, 2.00pm.
Tickets are $12.50 (booking fees apply) and
available from the Aotea Centre Box Office or on 0800BUYTICKETS or www.buytickets.co.nz
Free for children under 3 years old.
For children of all ages but recommended for children 4 – 10 years old. We Built this City is performed in a safe and supervised play area, with a special space reserved for the little ones.
Check out the video at www.polyglottheatre.com/we-built-this-city
Additional Information
We Built This City was commissioned by the City of Melbourne in 2001.
History of Polyglot Theatre
Australia’s Polyglot Theatre is an internationally renowned creator of interactive and experiential theatre for children aged up to 12 years. At Polyglot, theatre is child’s play.
Polyglot’s theatre is inspired by the artwork, play and ideas of children and performances feature active participation from audience members through touch, play and encounter. The artistic works respond to the childhood need for experiences that encourage free artistic expression and an imaginative interpretation of the world. Seeking to challenge, foster curiosity and to inspire, they specialise in puppet theatre, large scale interactive installation work and participatory workshop programs.
In 1978 Polyglot Puppet Theatre was formed to promote understanding between cultures, bringing multi-language puppetry performance to theatres and schools for Victorian children. Since the year 2000 the company has greatly expanded its focus. Driven by a desire to reach a broader audience, Polyglot now creates performance and events for the street and festivals, interactive events for families, large scale theatre performances and community participation performance, as well as remaining loyal to schools through shows and workshops. Responding to the changing cultural climate, Polyglot has been involved in collaborations, co-productions, partnerships and consultative processes that inform and enrich the company’s product.
For over 30 years, Polyglot has been recognized as one of Australia’s leading children’s theatre companies, and in recent years the company has been in demand internationally, playing to over 60 000 children annually on four continents.
Polyglot has been recognised for groundbreaking work in community participation performance, including translating a number of its performance into Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and has a reputation for excellence, innovation and quality in its professional productions.
Polyglot has embraced a meaningful engagement with communities bringing them into the creative process and creating puppetry inspired, designed, built and performed by kids. Part of this engagement is the Kids Creative Committee, designed to bring kids ideas, opinions and art into the creative development of new theatrical experiences.
Sue Giles – Artistic Director
Since Sue Giles was appointed Artistic Director of Polyglot in 2000, she has directed, written or devised fourteen works which have toured nationally and internationally, including The Big Game (Melbourne International Arts Festival, Singapore Arts Festival), Check Out! (Melbourne International Comedy Festival, National Theatre of Korea, Hong Kong International Arts Carnival, winner Excellent Production Award at Shanghai International Children’s Theatre Festival) Headhunter (UNIMA international puppetry festival, ASSITEJ international festival for young people, Drama Victoria Award winner), Muckheap (Esplanade Theatres Singapore, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, USA and translated into Mandarin-Chinese as La Ji Da Bian Shen and playing at the National Center for the Performing Arts, China) Baggy Pants, Tangle, City of Riddles, Sticky Maze, Paper Planet and the community spectacular High Rise. Her conceptual work We Built This City has toured continually for ten years.
Prior to working at Polyglot, Sue was a freelance director, writer and performer, working with her own company Shaken and Suspicious and other companies including Black Hole, Back To Back Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, Arena Theatre Company and Terrapin Puppet Theatre. She has written for ABC radio and episodes of Lift Off for the Children’s Television Foundation. Sue has directed over 30 productions and written 21 produced plays.
In 2003, she was the Australian representative at the International Director’s Forum hosted by ASSITEJ Germany. In 2004 she was the Victorian Representative on the National Board of YPAA (Young People and the Arts, Australia) and from 2008-9 she was on the steering committee of the national puppetry organisation UNIMA. In 2009, Sue was the Puppetry Director of the Australian production of the Broadway musical, Avenue Q.
Stressful for parents; a mixed experience for children
Review by Kate Ward-Smythe 19th Apr 2012
Full credit to Australia’s Polyglot Theatre for creating an organic shared experience as a free-form outdoor construct. Or, as they describe it, “An interactive play space.” Full credit to The Edge’s Time Out Theatre for presenting We Built This City, taking a risk and bringing it to Auckland kids at a price parents can afford.
Thousands of boxes lie in a heap in the middle of Aotea Square, as hundreds of kids with parents queue to get in and play with the boxes for an hour, loosely ‘guided’ by a small group of Bob The Builder-type actors, in red hard hats and overalls. In a pre-show briefing, the sky is the limit, we are told, in terms of what we could do, with the exception of a few rules (“no throwing, snatching, climbing, destroying of boxes; keep the aisles clear; work in teams and have fun”).
Practically speaking, due to the large crowd numbers and small number of Bobs, it ends up being pretty hands-off guidance. I see two Bobs cruise past our section during the hour. You are pretty much on your own, self-managing your own experience and trying not to lose your kids.
Therefore, being fluid, in a confined space and in a relatively uncontrolled environment; each individual’s experience is coloured and shaped by those they end up creating next to.
Unfortunately, my hour in the maze of boxes is stressful, hands-on, with moments of rising panic that make me wonder if I have developed claustrophobia. The two 8 year-olds I have with me fare better, but still have their creativity marginalised by circumstances beyond our control.
The circumstances are 3-fold. First, a young child who, as soon as he realises he is surrounded by boxes, starts wailing, “I want to go home, I want to go home.” Parent in tow have others to consider, who are into the boxes, so the youngest is left to stand and wail for a long time. Nothing to be done really. Second, two older kids, with no parent in tow, spend the first ten minutes throwing boxes at each other. We are in the middle. Finally, two enthusiastic kids, again without a parent in sight, want to create more space next to our tower /house /tunnel creation… so they simply clear a space by throwing their spare boxes on our tower… which duly collapses, creating a domino effect, which climaxes in my girl bursting into tears. “It’s all ruined.” We get over it, after a time, and rebuild.
Apart from that, my two 8 year-olds have a good time. I am completely fried, harassed, hot and bothered by the end of the hour, but remind myself that I must not, under any circumstances, destroy the kid’s buzz.
Constructive teamwork is so cool to watch and be part of so I am disappointed our section of Box-land ended up the way it did. I’m sure there were positive, more supervised, engaging, dynamic group experiences all through Box-land, as this show has been “performed in cities around the world with critical acclaim.”
Frustrations and disappointments, and how to overcome them, is no doubt part of Polyglot’s aim here, but I can only speak to my experience yesterday. To avoid a complete melt-down, in the middle of a tower of boxes, with no immediate escape route, a lot of patience and supervision was required from me, plus occasional careful strategic intervention, for the full 60 minutes. The third time you suggest with a smile on your face that “co-operation and communication with your fellow builders is the key to success,” it gets harder to say, when unsupervised kids don’t care.
Occasionally the Bobs offer something very helpful over the PA like, “Let’s make sure the little kids don’t get lost in amongst any boxes.” I speculate on whether any of them are parents.
I wonder if practical tweaks in the construction of the initial mass of boxes might help the confusing chaos. The aisles could easily be twice as wide; the overall surface area of Box-land could easily be another 4 metres wide each way; and finally, there are so many boxes, in is hard to find clear ground to start the build: we were falling over our boxes and our neighbours, all the time. “Too many boxes, not enough space,” said the girls, almost in unison. 60 minutes is a very long time under such conditions.
The aspects of the hour my two 8 year-olds did enjoy, included: “destroying everything at the end” (I spent this time watching out for two little Indian girls who had lost their parents and nearly got swallowed up in the destruction); “planning, design, decisions, discovering at the start”(i.e., first phase, on arrival — what they would build and where); “looking around at what others had done” and “being interviewed by that guy walking round from bfm.”
The things they didn’t enjoy included, “The big kids being bullies and no one telling the big kids off at the start coz they were ruining everything”; “the little kids kicking stuff down to get past”; “random throwing of boxes”; “screaming little kids.”
While I take on board that micro-management would kill the very essence of this concept and premise, I still say to those parents who let their kids run amok, unsupervised, creating havoc — shame on you. A collective task cannot get underway with any sense of shared enjoyment, if the basic elements of teamwork, are not in place. Our little corner of the universe seemed doomed by bad foundations.
In summary: parents and caregivers, if you are up for the challenge, go for it; it’s a full-on shared experience that your kids will enjoy, if they like compromising, communicating, building and burrowing round in nooks and crannies. It is an interesting observation of human nature; child physiologists would have a field day.
I suggest queuing early; choosing a spot near the edge and the exit; forming a plan for if you lose each other, leaving all unnecessaries (jerseys, cameras, bags and anything else hand-held) in the car (you’re on your feet, using both hands to stop a cascade of boxes coming down, the whole time). In terms of adult to child ratio, I think one to two is best.
As a parent, it may not end up an entertaining or relaxing hour, but your kids may well thank you for making the effort.
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