© Bob Van Dantzig

A Gril Skipping

Graeme Miller

They skip, sing rhymes, drink, run, shoot up and chase each other. They rush about like whirling dervishes taking the world by storm, drawn into games that spread like a contagious disease, imposing obedience and conformity, called back to order by the strident ringing of the bell.

Details

In the playground with its standing puddles of water, in the classroom where shards of broken glass break up the starkness of the blackboard, their voices and footsteps mingle; between anger, embarrassment and pressures from the group in which each token of tenderness is taken as an attack, the lessons degenerate, the shocks multiply, chaos sets in… Grappling with a world that is falling apart, these adults bursting with vitality restore the ritual, initiatory dimension of play and its rules. Their cathartic music disturbs us. From a lost generation that stagnates, purposeless, in contemporary Great Britain, a cry that gathers force throughout the performance and hits us hard at the end.

Credits

Written, directed and set to music by Graeme Miller