If Children Ruled the World (Chaos Wonderland)

Theatre Porto,

For this project, I delivered 17 workshops with primary schools and community groups across Ellesmere Port, inviting children to imagine what it would be like to have complete agency: to rewrite the rules, challenge injustice and, sometimes, simply have things exactly their own way.

The workshops used this playful premise to explore bigger ideas around citizenship, democracy, rights and responsibility. We looked at who makes the rules, who gets to change them, what makes something fair or unfair, and how the decisions we make affect other people. Children identified the things that mattered to them, invented their own rules and debated what it might actually be like to live in the worlds they were creating.

Some of their ideas were wonderfully silly: trampoline pavements, Taco Tuesdays. But beyond these, children repeatedly raised the concerns they could see affecting the world around them. They talked about access to play, the cost of living, homelessness, children's safety, inequality, inclusion and the environment. Their ideas ranged from the radical and thoughtful to the playful, gluttonous and completely ludicrous.

Using masking tape, permanent markers and acrylic paint pens, children graffitied their rules directly onto their school desks, temporarily transforming the most everyday symbol of school rules and authority into a space for their own voices.

We brought thousands of these statements together to create a huge, punky, multi-coloured manifesto that filled the walls of Theatre Porto. A selection of the children’s rules was also transferred onto long coloured ribbons to form a maypole, bringing ideas of childhood, play and movement back into the installation.

At its heart, the work was an expression of children’s ideas, hopes and frustrations in a world where other people make the rules.