Smartie Mission – Stan’s Cafe

Smartie Mission was a follow-up project by Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company, which came after Of All The People In All The World. The company wanted to make the piece accessible to children, whilst maintaining the idea of visually representing statistics. The piece involved the participating children counting out and measuring different food stuffs to represent different statistics. Wealth/poverty, sea levels, mountain heights etc.

The theatre company states on their website that this project made a conscious effort to have it’s audience “take control of as many aspects of the production as possible” (Stan’s Cafe, 2011). I really like this ‘hands-on’ approach to this type of performance/instillation.  Allowing the audience to participate, whether they are children or adults, would hopefully help them to better understand the size and scale of each statistic that is being presented.

I would like to experiment with this type of audience participation, giving roles to audience member, responsibilities that they have to carry out in order for the piece to progress.

The website for Stan’s Cafe can be found here: http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/project-smartie-mission.html