There’s a scene in Raw where a group of young children act out an impromptu picnic. As it progresses, you can feel the adults in the audience stiffen while the kids beside them stare at the stage in awe. Against every parental safety rule, the young performers smash open a can of frankfurters with small, sharp rocks, then mess around with lighted matches as they try to fire up an ancient primus stove.
Joke Laureyns, co-founder of the Belgian dance company Kabinet K, laughs when she describes the rehearsal where that scene was improvised. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, are we crossing a line here?’ And the children were giving us a little look: ‘Can we really do this, can we really have this freedom?’ But we let them go on. There was no real danger. When we work with these children, we make a situation of trust. It was beautiful to see how they played with the elements we gave them. We have an idea of what we might get from them, but there is always a degree of wonder at what comes out.”
Raw is a production full of wonder. Laureyns and her partner, Kwint Manshoven, were inspired to make tit by a TV documentary about children living below the poverty line, and while their own material makes no specific reference to place or circumstance, it’s a bright, funny, startling evocation of the resilience of children who survive on the margins of society. The stage is a desolate wasteland of rubble, junk and dripping water; all kinds of danger appear to be lurking in its dark shadows. Yet as the seven child dancers race through wild (but tightly patterned) games of tag, romp on a battered filthy mattress and play with stones, there’s an astonishing quality of innocence in the way they’re together. Even though the final performance is staged, the way they giggle or move intuitively to protect each other looks spontaneous. Throughout the hour-long performance, they inhabit a world that’s almost entirely independent of the piece’s two dysfunctional adult characters: a volatile, irresponsible young man played by Manshoven, and a strange, witchy older woman.
During the final moments the children advance towards the audience, crossing over a litter of tin cans that scatter from their feet. With a fierce tension in their bodies, we can easily imagine them as survivors from Syrian war zones, youngsters from Indian slums or as Palestinian children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.
The richness of their performances is paradoxically rooted in the fact that Laureyns and Manshoven only ever ask the children to be themselves, and rarely discuss with them the ideas behind the work. “It’s very important to us that the children aren’t self-conscious, or pretending to be anyone else,” Manshoven explains. “The cast of Raw were originally aged between seven and 10 when the work was premiered three years ago and during its five-month period of creation. The choreographers guided the group through improvised tasks and games, so it was crucial that the process felt like play. It was crucial to them that the stories unfolding on stage were seen principally through the children’s point of view.”
Fifteen years ago, when Laureyns and Manshoven first began creating work together, they didn’t intend to collaborate with children – they were simply interested in exploring ways in which non-trained dancers might move and respond to professionals on stage. But one of their early works happened to have children in its cast, and after it was nominated for a prestigious youth award the two choreographers slowly recognised that this could be their niche. Although they have adults performing in their productions, it’s the children who give their work its special alchemy.
Selecting those children is itself an art. Laureyns and Manshoven prefer to work with those who don’t have any formal training, but they do ask for an exceptional degree of concentration: “These children have to have a lot of internal motivation, they have to be able to relate to the tasks we give them.” Other requirements depend on the production, and for Raw they were looking for children with an innate strength and charisma. “We wanted children who are direct, who could look people straight in the eye, or who had something a little bit fierce or brutal in them.”
They admit that as well as selecting the children, they also audition the mothers and fathers. It demands generosity and trust for parents to give their offspring over to one of Kabinet K’s productions – during the last three years Raw has toured as far afield as Japan. But these performers are not stage school kids who have signed themselves up for professional childhoods. And while Lauryens and Manshoven ensure that most performances don’t interfere with the children’s schooling, they can’t avoid the fact that the show’s busy diary eats away at their time at home. Nor can they help that they can form relationships with the children that are as intimate as that between parent and child. During performance periods they spend a lot of time together, mucking around with the children as well as rehearsing in order to keep the material fresh. For the last three years, everybody involved in Raw has become as close as family.
The choreographers have been fortunate in that most of the parents have become friends over time and appreciate the extraordinary experiences their children have been given. This mutual gratitude was put to the test last year when Kompany K were invited to perform in Beirut and Palestine. Most parents refused permission for Beirut – the official travel advice was too alarming – but they were eventually persuaded to accept Palestine. They recognised that however beleaguered the border crossings might be, the interior would be safe.
The trip was one of the highlights of the three-year tour. The children were collectively bowled over by the joyousness and warmth of the response they received, both in Ramallah and east Jerusalem. “The Arab children, with little English, kept trying to tell us that they loved us; the adults kept hugging the children so hard we had to rescue them. It was so nice. After the show they ordered taxis and made a huge fire on the outskirts of the city and they danced with us all night.”
The Palestine trip did have one unintended consequence: ne 13-year-old boy was aware of the political situation, and his anger and concern distanced him from the more innocent dynamic displayed by the other children. He began to feel as though he had outgrown the production, and although he was replaced by a much younger boy, the rest of the cast are now becoming too old for the show as well.
Raw is a portrait of children, not teenagers. While there’s a possibility of a future revival with a different cast, for this particular group the Edinburgh performances may well be their last. “It will be a very emotional time,” says Laureyns. “They have become our own children, and the children themselves are saying that they feel this group is their second family, and that a black hole will open up in their lives when we stop.” Yet the poignancy of the show’s termination is also a measure of the quality of its material – a combination of art and play, of adult and childhood experience – that feels as real as a documentary, but as cathartic as theatre.
-
Kabinet K’s Raw is at the Edinburgh international festival from 27-28 August. Box office: 0131- 473 2000
