The Storm Shepherd

All Things Considered

The Storm Shepherd is an immersive audio experience for a child and their grown up which takes place within the home. As parents we recognised that the lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic had turned our kitchen tables into places of work, zoom meetings and often placed us as the teachers. We wanted to reclaim the space as one for adventure and play. The performance intertwines our skills as socially engaged theatre makers exploring the invitation to participate and explores ideas around going out into the big wide world.

The binaural audio experience is beautifully designed to bring to life the storms and the world they inhabit. Foley recordings created the sonic details such as flicking through pages of a book to create the tiny beating wings of the moths. The idea was to take the table and to make it the set, the place of adventure and in order to do this we asked Lydia Denno to create a pack of things to do, explore and make before the performance. We love the idea that the performance begins the moment the pack is posted through your door and lands on the mat!

The performance runs at 40 minutes and during this you will be the stage managers, at other times the performers and at times the audience. The grown up and child hear different tracks but we took the time to make sure that the imagined space was the same so both hear the narrator on the left and side of them whilst the imagined cave lives on the right hand side of you both.

Whilst this has its roots in the Covid crisis, it reflects on that in-between age for children where they want to go off into the big wide world, but that world can be a bit scary, and the performance also asks the grown ups how much do they hold on and how much do they let go. And as is with all of our work these are big questions we don't know the answer to.

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