Lake Life

When kunstenfestivaldesarts asked me to make a work for young audiences, I remembered how the interactive pieces Worktable and In Many Hands, which we’d made entirely for adult audiences, became so much better when young people joined too. I knew I wanted to make a place for audiences of mixed-ages to spend time together, and especially with people they don’t know.

Early in the process we learned about the story of the Changelings – it’s such a beautiful mirror for how Humans might enjoy transformation, or reject it. How they might enjoy Otherness in themselves and in each other, or reject it. We wrote our own Changeling story to celebrate their heroic skills of curiosity, empathy and imagination – which seem pretty Human to me too [Changelings are characters from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – ed].

On the subject of transformation, young people and teenagers sometimes get described as being in a liminal state of not-yet fully human (i.e. adult) but I think figuring out how to be human is more of a lifelong process regardless of age.

A couple of weeks before premiere, this conversation between Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña found its way to me:

Camila Marambio – So, my question is: how can we loosen this stiffness before it kills us?
Cecilia Vicuña: I think it is through finding a way to sort of dissolve… I vacate any definition of humanness that I’m acquainted with. And in that moment, I think I become transparent. I have done exercises where I am able to become invisible… When I first learned this, I was still a teenager, when I learnt to rob the books in a bookstore in front of the eyes of the bookstore owner… It is the practice of becoming so fluid, liquid in state. (Extract from the book Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja, Errant Bodies Press, 2019)

• Kate McIntosh
• April 2023