RESEARCH:

CHILDREN'S AUDIENCES

ABOUT:

We live in an age when it is vital to tell each other our stories and to engage our children with stories that unite them to our shared humanity. It is through the sharing of stories that our children connect to and understand our past, and their present, and so become the leaders of the future. In today’s rapidly changing world of entertainment, how is live performance to survive if we do not engage a new audience? If we do not inspire and nurture today’s youth with a love of live performance there will be no audience for live storytelling tomorrow.

Wonder Dome encourages the child to actively participate in the story, to embody the story, and to have agency in the narrative by incorporating techniques (sensors, large scale digital images, computers, etc.) and modes of storytelling (video games, television, internet, apps) that speak to entertainment trends that already exist in the child’s everyday lives. Through our initial work, Wonder Dome has already created an interactive experience, Leo the Geo-DESIC-Dome, for a multi-generational audience, where our focus was to transcend the type of work extant by concentrating on storytelling through technology, not solely a focus on the technology itself.

GOALS:

• Break down the traditional hierarchy of audience participation in performance contexts.

• Embody children in the narrative by encouraging them to move as opposed to  traditional theatre where they passively experience the event, buried in cushioned seats designed for adults.
• Explore the relationship between spectator, performer and system.
• Create agency and empowerment within the narrative and different modes of performance transactions.
• Incorporate interactive digital technologies into the narrative to engage children as participants in the story.
• Create new modes of storytelling with an experiential media system specific to a dome.

DEVELOPMENT:

Our team is interested in devising new work and adapting existing children’s literature for unique performances in the dome. Our stories can grow in scale and we are developing science and engineering specific experiences.

Humans tell stories. How we tell them changes.