Canadian company Mammalian Diving Reflex give agency to children and young people and, in the process, help us reassess our relationship with them. In Nightwalks With Teenagers, at this year’s In Between Time festival, children lead an audience of adults on a merry dance, making us run, dance and charge through the streets of Knowle West in Bristol. Passersby look on in astonishment, as if the world has been turned upside down.
Which, of course, it has. Would you let a group of teenagers you didn’t know take you on a very muddy, magical mystery tour? If you saw a group of them running screaming down the street screaming, you’d probably cross the road nervously.
Here, however, we are in their hands. And those hands prove surprisingly gentle: they hug us, coax us to reconnect with our childhood selves on the monkey bars; they introduce us to the estate’s resident duck; they perform an absurdly funny play in which they seem to be trying on adult personas for size. All of which leads to the possibility that we might only be playing at being adults. For 90 minutes, these kids give us the gift of being allowed to behave like children again.
Elsewhere at the festival, Jo Bannon, an artist born with albinism, presents Alba, a meditation on standing out and blending in. Bannon’s hair shimmers like a beacon in the darkness as she leads us on a quiet, reflective and wry journey excavating her own history and reminding us that there are many ways of seeing: ourselves and others. When Bannon’s mother, whose voice is heard on audio, first glimpsed her baby daughter, she announced her “a miracle”. In its own unassuming way, this show is a little miracle, too.
• IBT15 continues until 22 February. Box office: 0117 917 2300
