"She danced for Red Beard to distract him – to make him forget about killing.
Her anger went into the shoes.
She danced with her dad’s spirit.
She’s going to dance herself away.
The shoes took her feelings and turned them into dance.
She danced like a bird and she was shot like a bird.
She looked like an angel when she was dancing and she was like an angel when she died".
(Year 5 & 6 pupils)
A drama and dance project in collaboration with The Place. Residencies in four primary schools in Camden, Southwark and Westminster explored themes from the Unicorn/Place award-winning co-production Red Red Shoes, by Charles Way.
The play is a powerful piece of theatre, where dance is a central element in telling a disturbing and topical story. Franvera, the central character, is a joyful girl who loves to dance in the red shoes she has received for her birthday. Her home life is disrupted through the prejudice and hostility of her neighbours, who prevent her associating with her best friend Anna, as her warring society tears itself apart, and death blights both their families.
The project consisted of a fulltime, week-long residency with one KS2 class in each school prior to them seeing the production, and follow-up visits to explore the connections made by the participants between the two. The four schools involved in the project were chosen on the basis that many of the children had a history of mobility, and the chosen class in each school included a number of asylum seekers and refugees. They also contained a high proportion of children for whom English was not their first language.
The team assembled by Unicorn Education and The Place’s Learning and Access department, consisted of drama and dance project leaders, an actor, a dancer and a musician.
As in the play which, as Lyn Gardner of the Guardian wrote, ‘blurs the boundaries of the spoken word and the physical, creating its own language full of emotional nuance’, so too the project combined exploration through movement and drama to engage the participants with complex ideas and emotions. Friendship, support, racism, family and community strife and leaving home were among the meanings that they articulated in discussion and explored in dance, drama and art. As well as learning through their own creative process, the children also became critically aware audience, able to interpret meaning through symbol and metaphor, and to make sophisticated prognosis about the motivations, feelings and fates of the characters in the play:
The Red Red Shoes Education Project was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Westminster Arts