This website is an ever evolving collection of the creative development ideas and content arising from our playing and thinking as we devise our new show Seven Little Wonders across the period 2020-2022.
Even though this website is designed as a resource for the creative team, it is also open to anyone interested in having a look at what we’re up to.
It is ever-evolving so feel free to drop in now and again.
CREATIVE TEAMTheatre-maker/Performers – Gavin Clarke, Sarah Bronkensha and Anya McKee
Composer – Gavin Clarke
Technical Director/Provocateur – Bob Weatherly,
Conceptualist/Director/Theatre-maker – Dave Brown,
Founded by Dave Brown, The PaperBoats is an international partnership platform for theatre-makers, who co-create new works mainly for 3-8 year old children. We use a set of 7 principles to scaffold our theatre-making processes, the details of which can be found at thepaperboats.com/principles.
In the first 5 year phase of The PaperBoats, we developed 4 new works from the same animating idea – “explore two”.
The directors of these works shared each others content and ideas whilst developing their own very distinctive outcomes. The result was 4 vastly different, sibling productions – which are now delivering 100’s of performances to young audiences.
We are extending our co-creation practices into the Seventological Wonderment cluster of projects across the 2020-2025 phase.
We know that the depth of creative expression we manage to achieve inside a project is defined to a great extend by the accumulation of ideas and content that feeds it; much like the associative cortexes of a brain interconnected by neuronal threads.
This pool of material, accumulated across a number of years and a number of projects, provides a deep, rich and evolving artistic “mulch” for the makers to grapple with and evolve.
In this way, each of the projects to contributes to and draws from, the co-creation pool of material.
We’re excited to develop this key co-creation practice across the new cluster of projects as an ongoing manifestation of The PaperBoats ever evolving set of creative principles.
“We “conscious” beings share the amazing ability to witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence; a spectacle that is at once mysterious, joyous, tragic, trembling, majestic, confusing, comic, nurturing, unpredictable and predictable, ecstatic, beautiful, cruel, sacred, devastating, exhilarating.
The cosmos will grind on for eternity long after we’re gone, cold and unobserved. But for these few powers of ten, we have been. We have seen, we have felt, we have lived!!”
Alan Lightman
– seven thousand trillion trillion atoms in each of us, on average –
were forged in the furnace of faraway stars.
SEVENTOLOGICAL.WONDERMENT is the 2020-2025 cluster of projects by The PaperBoats all exploring the wonders of light, colour, music and the number 7.
- The Wonderbox Music Suite (community project for 3-8 year olds)
- Seven Little Wonders (in-theatre production for 3-8 year olds)
- Wonder (with Sally Chance Dance for 0-3 year olds)
- Sevenwell (an eclectic exploration of live and online possibility with Jon Bode)
- The Trick of the Light Fandango (community halls production with Eliza Lovell and Rory Walker for 3-8 yr olds)
These projects are developing across a 5 year period from 2020-2025.
The Seventological Wonderment projects will all respond to single animating framework – albeit in a myriad of ways.
ANIMATING IDEA
The animating framework is inspired by Sir Issac Newton’s discovery in the 17th Century that white light could be split into the colours of the rainbow using a prism.
Because seven was a magical and mystical number in those times, Newton imagined that he saw seven colours in the rainbow (ROY G BIV ~ red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) which beautifully coincided with his observation that there are seven notes in the diatonic musical scale.
Newton conjectured that light, colour, music and sound are intrinsically intertwined.
Our cluster of projects is playing with the notion that 7 colours of light and 7 notes of music is a pallete of infinite expression that when guided by our curiosity can help us in defining “how we act in the world.”
That question is in broad terms is “the key to our exisitence” and our response “is our existence!”
The way we express ourtselves in the world – the way we pursue and manifest ideas – the way we engage with the vast unknown – the way we give expression to our creative impulses – the way we balance chaos and order – are the key themes that are emerging – alongside those aspects of human nature and contemporary life that act as barriers to the foundations of who we are as imaginative, sentient, conscience beings in a vast universe.
THE PROJECTS
WONDERBOX MUSIC SUITE ~ Gavin Clarke is composing and recording a suite of music inspired by the wonders with support from a community choir and a community band. Anya McKee and Dave Brown will create/curate video content to be presented alongside a performance of the Wonderbox Music Suite in December 2021. This project is supported by a Regional Arts Australia Fund ~ Step Up Grant.
SEVEN LITTLE WONDERS ~ a poetic visual theatre performance for 3-8 year olds by artists, Gavin Clarke, Sarah Brokensha and Anya McKee working with Dave Brown and Bob Weatherly through The PaperBoats in association with Country ArtsSA and ArtsSA.
WONDER ~ a community participation project for 0-3 yr olds and carers by Sally Chance Dance in association with The PaperBoats and Insite Arts. https://bit.ly/sallychance
SEVENWELL ~ A playground of whimsical content-making by The PaperBoats being brewed by Jon Bode and Dave Brown – https://sevenwell.org
The Sevenwell project will evolve into a wide-ranging package of online and live outcomes and meta narratives due to launch in 2022-23.
The Trick of the Light Fandango
The Trick of the Light Fandango will indirectly share, through director, Dave Brown, ideas and content from each of the other projects in the Seventological Wonderment cluster.
Whilsts the performer-makers (Eliza and Rory) will have no direct knowledge of these other projects, they will create content by responding to the tasks, provocations, improvisations and thought experiments offered by the director which will be informed by the other works in the cluster.
In this way, the performer-makers will be generating fresh content, scaffolded by a body of research that is evolving elsewhere – without being directly influenced by it.
children watching the stars is the aim and the end …
Visit our website: thepaperboats.org
seven little wonders 