A schools residency at Charles Dickens Primary School, Southwark, using drama and video to engage young people in the topic of human cloning and genetics

Future Tense, one of the Unicorn’s most innovative education projects, was a two week residency with a class of 11 year olds, which had a dual aim - the children would encounter key issues in bio-medical science through process drama, and the Unicorn team would explore innovative ways of collaborating with a school and generating new writing for children and young people. The Unicorn’s creative team included a drama facilitator, a director, two actors, a writer, a video artist and a science adviser. A further important aim for the team was to discover how the presence of these professionals might enrich the drama process while allowing the children’s ideas to provide the driving force of the work.

In the drama, which was set in the near future, the children were placed in a situation where they experienced in a personal way the implications of human cloning. Should children be programmed before they are born to become more healthy, intelligent, or gifted? Are there situations where it might be acceptable to raise a child who was a clone? These are questions that adults are currently theoretically engaged with, but which will be real life issues for these children as the next generation of parents.

As they reflected on their feelings, the children, with the help of the writer, created diaries and individual dossiers documenting their fictional lives through birth certificates, school reports and medical records. They also wrote poems, both individually and collectively.
 
On the final day of the residency, elements of the work from the previous two weeks were selected and shaped for presentation to another class and several invited guests. The performance combined live and video work staged in the form of a public enquiry.

A short pilot for this project took place in 2002, funded by the Wellcome Trust.
The Residency was supported by the Pool of London Partnership, on behalf of the London Development Agency.