We sat down for a quick chat with Fevered Sleep. Following a highly successful Hong Kong premier in April, they will bring their 5-hour durational live show ‘Time Keeps The Drummer’ on a new UK tour.
Hi Sam and David! Can you tell us a little about Fevered Sleep and what you do?
We (Sam and David) set up Fevered Sleep in 1996 after meeting at university. We started by making performance purely for adult audiences, but after being asked to create a show for very young children while we were working at BAC in London, we realised we wanted to open up our work to audiences of children and young people, as well as adults. Across the years we’ve experimented in different art forms – theatre and dance, film, installation, print and digital art. Our projects are made through processes of collaboration and co-creation, increasingly placing children and young people at the heart of the work. We’re committed to social and environmental justice, to radical politics, to the rights of the non-human, to advocacy and to change.
What does your process look like when you make new work together?
All our processes start with research, with reading and studying and by having conversations with lots of different people; from those considered ‘experts’ in our subject matters, and more importantly from everybody else whose perspective or experience is relevant to the theme – scientists, children, doctors, teachers, philosophers etc. Then we gather our other creative collaborators together, including young people, get them all in a space to talk, and play together until we discover what we find exciting and what our questions are. We unravel ideas and work out what isn’t relevant or interesting or challenging. Our process is very much like a live and ongoing curation of images, feelings, and human (and non human) interaction.
You debuted your show Time Keeps The Drummer in Hong Kong this April, and now you’re bringing it to various UK audiences – what’s the journey been like so far, and how would you describe the show?
We were invited to make a piece for family audiences in Hong Kong. After lots of conversations and research, we got really excited about children’s experience of time and play, and notions of work and rest. The show plays with perceptions of time on every level – it’s 5 hours long, it’s entirely improvised by the child performers. There’s dance, movement, conversation, brilliant images, beautiful lighting, an incredible new score, plus there’s 1 adult drummer improvising the whole time! The audience are free to stay as long as they want, and to come and go if they like. The concept sounds wild when we describe it, and honestly, we didn’t know if it was even possible, but people find the whole experience very joyful, profound, dark, meditative and often really surprising!
What would you like future audiences to take from Time Keeps The Drummer?
We want Time Keeps The Drummer to challenge people’s ideas around time – what’s important to centre in their lives, or to reclaim what capitalism has frankly taken from them! The show, and the children who make the show live in front of them, remind us of the importance of simple play, of being in the moment, of allowing themselves to be wholly themselves in the complexity of their human animalness. What would it be like if we allowed children all the time they need? If we never felt hurried, or the need to hurry others? If we just slowed down, or rested for no reason? The performers sometimes ask you to consider your mortality in the race against time, and sometimes they just invite you to laugh with them!
Why is it important to challenge and expand upon preconceptions of ‘children’s theatre’ in your work?
We noticed really early on in our career, that artists are rarely asked to make complex work for children – work not based on a book, work without a narrative, abstract, experimental work, art that invites questions without offering answers – this is usually reserved for adults. As if children are not also complex, deep thinking, humans. If anything, it’s while they’re young they have the elasticity in their brains and the softness in their bodies to consider all the different ways of living in or thinking about themselves in the world, and we think it’s our job as artists to make work which honours this.
Looking to the future of Fevered Sleep – alongside ‘time’, is there another big topic you’d next like to explore?
We always want to make work about things in the world, in society which we perceive as a problem, or around challenging themes. We’ve made work about grief, about touch, about climate change and environmental justice, about our relationship to non-human animals. We’ve always been and will continue to be committed to amplifying the voices of children and young people, and making art which feels most relevant. So we’ll just keep asking children and young people what they care most about. But looking forward, we’re also working on some ideas to find ways to enable them to explore what is most important to them, what and how they want to bring about change, as young people growing up in what is an increasingly challenging world.