Lead Artist - Lucy Gaizely (Scotland, (over)protection Lab)
Collaborator - Veronica Dyas (Ireland, (over)protection Lab)
Collaborator - Caitríona Ní Mhurchú (Ireland, (over)protection Lab)
Collaborator - Geraldine Heaney (Scotland, PUSH Filmmaker)
Lucy took part in the (over)protection Lab hosted by Krokusfestival in Hasselt, Belgium in September 2017. She is now developing a new production with her company 21Common called In The Interests of Health and Safety can Patrons please Kindly supervise their Children at all times with Veronica, Caitríona and Geraldine from the same Lab.
"21Common will invite 4 parents/guardians and their children from areas in Dublin and Glasgow to start developing a new work which will explore the rationale, reasons and consequences of over protection. We will work with a diverse group of people who all share different ways of parenting as well as have a different outlook and personal needs. We will interrogate the culture of safeguarding in these areas and create a performance that will respond to these ideas.
We will start the development phase of this work in Dublin seeking the artistic and facilitation skills of Veronica Dyas and performer Caitriona Ni Mhurchu. We will present this work in Dublin and then take the model we have developed to Tramway in Glasgow. It is our ambition to take this model all over the world, we are aware that this enquiry is specific to our experience and would like to engender a dialogue with those that are cultural and geographically separate to us. We will work with Glasgow based artist Geraldine Heaney as film artist and facilitator to create a film of the artistic process as well as invite the performers in the work in Dublin to become part of the Glasgow show respectively.
The Model:
21Common explore Popular Culture as an overarching theme of all their work. We will look at creating an Iconic soundtrack based around commercial music. This will be developed with the guest performers in the work. We use Dance, multi-media and performance as our tools for communication.
We will ask the parents the following questions:
- What is your autobiography?
- How does this affect your way of parenting?
- What are you frightened of?
- Where are you from?
- What do you do right and wrong?
We will ask the Children the following questions:
- What is the most dangerous thing you have ever done?
- Who looks after you?
- How brave are you?
- What are you frightened of?
- When do you feel free?
- What should you never do?
- What advice do you have for parents?
The performance will take place on a partitioned stage. Parents on one side and children on the other. We will develop the show separately and structure the show as two shows in one."
In The Interests of Health and Safety can Patrons please Kindly supervise their Children at all times: The Dublin and Glasgow addition
In the Interest of, is an exploration of the consequences of a societies reluctance to facilitate their children to take risks. It is an acknowledgement of the relative freedoms Children and Young People enjoyed pre the 1990’s. Without undue nostalgia for the era of bike riding, tree climbing and roaming the neighbourhood from dawn until dusk, we will look at what has changed and why. Where do the real dangers lie for our children and whose responsibility is it to ascertain safeguarding and protection?
We live in a frightened culture. A parent who instills wildness and freedom into their child is negligent, a parent who smothers their child in security and observation is a good parent. We would rather our 15 year old’s are holed up in their bedroom on snap chat safe from misadventure than concern ourselves with who they might be chatting to and how isolated they might be in this relative safety.
Gary Gardiner and Lucy Gaizely are both parents and both consider the current culture of over protection to be damaging but we are also complicit in our culture and affected by it. We want to make sure our children grow up to be the best that they can be, that they have had an exciting and physical childhood, that they are able to take calculated risks to better understand themselves and are able to contribute to a healthy and productive society.
We are afraid though, we are afraid of getting it wrong, misconstruing litigation, rebelling too hard, actually frightened that something bad might happen and it would be all our fault.
