This article by Catherine Love explores the creation process of theatre show Belongings (for 6-11 year olds) by Tangled Feet and Rowan Tree Dramatherapy through interviews with cast, creative team and participants. Total estimated reading time: 30mins.
The process is explored through analysis of the four main visual metaphors in the show: mirrors, clothes, shadows and parachute.
Contents:
- It all starts with play: the co-creation process
- Timeline of the making process
- Mirrors
- Clothes
- Shadows
- Parachute
- Long-term enquiry
It all starts with play.
Play as a safe way of exploring difficult experiences.
Play as a starting point in the rehearsal room.
Play as a way of bridging the gap between performers and spectators.
Play as something that brings people together.
Play is often undervalued. It’s seen as the opposite of work. But play as a creative tool sits at the heart of Tangled Feet’s theatre-making. It’s one of the driving forces behind Belongings - a show for 6 to 11-year-olds inspired by the experiences of young people in the care system.
Belongings follows the journey of nine-year-old Cleo, who is entering care after being separated from her mum. At her new foster home, she meets BT and Leila, who gradually welcome her into their games. Together, the three children play, learn to trust one another, and explore what it means to belong.
The show was made over the course of four years, with a pause in the middle of the process due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The performance shared with audiences is just the tip of the iceberg, or the outermost layer of the onion. To really understand Belongings and the nature of how Tangled Feet work as a company, it's necessary to look below the surface, to peel back the layers.
Belongings is the latest in a series of Tangled Feet shows that have used a dramatherapeutic approach. As Alex Ramsden, the company’s lead dramatherapist, explains, “it came from trying to bridge the gap between theatre and therapy”. The company was already delivering dramatherapy sessions, but this existed as a separate branch of its work. In Belongings and its predecessors, Need a Little Help and Butterflies, Tangled Feet’s dramatherapy and its audience-facing performance work came into contact. Emily Eversden, Tangled Feet’s participation manager, outlines what this looks like in practice:
“Dramatherapy is imbued throughout our work and we’ve developed this model of making work which we call the therapeutic theatre model of exploring the material: workshopping the material, but always making space for things to land, to settle, through reflective practice, discussing things after, recapping at the end of the day, at the start of the next day, talking about things that may have come up for us.”
For Belongings, Tangled Feet partnered with Rowan Tree Dramatherapy, who specialise in working with young people in care. A small group of these young people joined the project as co-creators, collaborating with the creative team to devise the piece. As director Nathan Curry explains, the process was “completely porous”, incorporating a range of different perspectives:
“Pedro [De Senna, creative consultant] would say something from an adoptive father’s point of view, and then a young person would say something from a child in foster care’s point of view, and I’d say something from an artistic point of view, and the show was somewhere in the middle of that. It’s all those different points of view together.”
This is reflected in how the young co-creators describe the experience. “It’s not like one person did this bit, another person did that bit,” says Henry. “One person would say something and then we would all build on that. So it was really everyone creating it.”
This process of co-creation involves a repeated cycle of exploration, creation, sharing and reflection, including a range of theatre-makers, creative consultants and early audiences.
“There is this constant movement between looking at process, incorporating those collaborators’ and audience members’ feedback, and also going no but what do we want to do, what’s right for the piece as well.”
Shireen Mula, dramaturg/writer in the room
"It’s a very intuitive and very empathetic process, because you’re listening to multiple different voices and you’re trying to interpret that into a world that is truthful for everyone in the room, everyone who’s going to watch it."
Becky-Dee Trevenen, designer
Timeline
Jan 2019: meetings with Rowan Tree; research
Feb 2019: 2 days R&D with 3 actors: images and physicality
July 2019: meetings with Rowan Tree; planning
Sept 2019: 2 days R&D with 3 actors: images and physicality
Sept 2019: first workshop with creative advisors: games, food, ideas, sharing some scenes
Jan 2020: second workshop with creative advisors: games, food, planning
Oct 2021: 4 days R&D including 1 day with creative advisors: images and characters and design
Oct 2021-March 2022: dramaturgy research period
March 2022: 4 days R&D including 1 day with creative advisors: dramaturgy and sound and design
June 2022: 4 weeks R&D including 2 days with creative advisors, 25minute sharing with school children in Luton after 3 weeks, 55 minute sharing with audience in Kent (including children in care system) after 4 weeks, creative advisors feedback / workshop
Sept-Dec 2022: script development and writing period
Jan 2023: final creative advisors workshop
Feb/March 2023: creation period
25th Feb 2023: premiere
4th March 2023: creative advisors see finished show in Canterbury; post-show workshop; larger workshop with children in care in Kent
“It’s about constantly asking for other people’s points of view and then listening to it and acting on it.”
Nathan Curry, co-artistic director
Mirrors
"it’s their story finally being shared and it’s given them the opportunity and the permission to talk about it"
Emily Eversden, participation director
Theatre has the power to reflect experiences back to us. It holds up a mirror to life. But not everyone’s reflections are given equal space.
This was one of the starting points for Belongings: a desire to reflect the under-represented experiences of young people not living with their birth parents. Bryony Brooker and Justine Staley, the co-founders of Rowan Tree Dramatherapy, wanted to work with Tangled Feet to create a space where the voices of children in care could be heard by a wider audience.
But it was clear to everyone from the start that this would not be about directly representing the experiences of the young co-creators. As dramaturg and writer in the room Shireen Mula explains, “we’re not there to take their stories […] and put them on stage”. Instead of creating documentary or verbatim theatre, Tangled Feet work through image, metaphor and physicality.
One of the earliest images to emerge from the workshops with the young co-creators was the use of mirrors. “There was this idea of reflection and self-image with the mirrors,” says Curry. This has travelled all the way through from the first R&D sessions to the public performances, which feature a mirrored floor that reflects the characters back to themselves at key moments in the narrative.
This use of metaphor allows the co-creators’ experiences to be reflected back to them in a different way, creating a kind of distance. As Eversden puts it, “detaching something from you is sometimes easier to talk about”. This is a central principle of dramatherapeutic practice, which uses metaphor and play as a way of exploring difficult experiences at a safe remove. Speaking from her experience as a dramatherapist, Staley explains that this involves “externalising inner landscapes and having some distance to look at and reflect on them”.
However, the co-creators also made it clear that they wanted audiences to know that the show was about young people in care. Mula remembers:
“At the very beginning we really didn’t know if it was going to be obvious in the piece that these kids were actually in the care system. It could have been a very metaphorical piece with the child in a big balloon or something, but as we continued developing it we felt representation was really important. One of the things that the young advisors said, which I always remember, was that they wanted the piece to be informative.”
Curry adds that “one of the big things for the young advisors was ‘I want all children to see this to understand my life’, that’s one of their big motivations”. Designer Becky-Dee Trevenen agrees that the specificity of life in the care system was vital to the piece: "we were making a show for young people about young people with a very specific experience, and it was important to honour those stories specifically". A key aim of the show, then, was to combine these distancing metaphors with a clear narrative that would speak to two sets of audience members: those who had experience of living in care and could see their own lives reflected on stage, and those who didn’t share the experience, but who could be encouraged to empathise.
For the co-creators themselves, there was also something powerful about this process of reflection. Ramsden explains: “actually witnessing an audience watch your story when the audience don’t know it’s your story - it’s not directly your story - and then being able to step into the space that you’ve created and that has been witnessed - it was quite transformative”.
“Wow! I cannot express what an impact Belongings had on our children and staff. This is especially so for the children we have in care. They were bursting to tell us how they related to the characters and it has enabled them to communicate with their teachers and friends about their home situations more openly. The other children now have much more understanding of children in care and how their lives are different from their own.”
Teacher feedback
“It shows a person’s life without their birth parents clearly. It shows all the emotions and actions clearly.”
Billy, co-creator
Clothes
"There are definitely layers, and some of the process feels closer to the surface and some of the process is buried deeper."
Pedro De Senna, creative consultant: adoptive father
Another of the metaphors that has been woven through Belongings since the very beginning is clothes. The idea of dressing up - of trying on different identities, of using clothes as a way to hide or fit in - was quickly grasped onto by the co-creators. Staley remembers the role of clothes in the early workshops:
“We played a lot with clothes in the research and development and the young people would create images out of clothes and step back and say ‘that reminds me of when I did this with my mum’, or ‘that reminds me of my social worker when they did this’. So the clothes become this projective tool.”
As anyone who played at dressing up as a child knows, clothes allow us to inhabit different roles and experiences. We can step - quite literally - into someone else’s shoes. Clothes are also a simple visual shorthand. A suit jacket, for example, can immediately suggest a figure of authority - a lawyer or a social worker. Tangled Feet played with these associations throughout the process, using clothes as a way of exploring other people, such as the absent adults who control so much of what happens to Cleo, BT and Leila.
This principle of trying on other people’s experiences is also at the heart of what the show is trying to do. As well as reflecting back the lives of children who live apart from their birth parents, Belongings aims to provide insight and generate empathy from audience members who have had no direct contact with the care system. Eversden suggests that
“Theatre is just a really powerful way to do that, because you can show something and it has had a really emotionally-led response with our audience. They’ve immediately felt something and understood, and it’s sparked that empathy within them.”
This element of empathy was crucial for the co-creators, who were keen for spectators to gain a greater understanding of what it’s like to live in care. As Billy puts it, “I just wanted people to get the feelings that the characters feel and understand that that’s the feelings we feel”. By showing familiar games and representing feelings that all children will have experienced, the show offers a way in for young people who may have never previously thought about the care system.
While the clothes have remained a central part of Belongings, the way they are used has evolved over the course of the process. As Curry explains, “we used to do lots of dressing up, and now it’s more the fabric of the world they’re in”. In performance, clothes signify a range of different things for the three characters. They are a tool of belonging - something that allows the children to create a sense of home wherever they are. When Cleo arrives at the foster home, BT and Leila each have their clothes spread out around them on the floor, marking out their territory. Clothes are also used to transform into other people, or to represent those who are absent. And the wrapped-up bundles of clothing and the clothes rail on wheels suggest transience and mobility, conveying the impermanence of these young people’s lives.
Trevenen traces the development of this theme of transience in the show's design. One of the things that most interested her in the early R&D sessions was "this transient existence that these young people experienced and how objects might help you create a sense of a constant space". As she explains, Trevenen always tries to include a dynamic piece of set - "something that is going to heighten the experience of the performers and the characters just by moving or by the performer interacting with it" - in her designs for Tangled Feet. Linked to ideas of transience and movement and to the use of clothes, her starting point for this dynamic element was the Hills Hoist: a rotary clothesline that children can swing from. Over time, this gradually became a more abstract frame on wheels that could both act as a clothes rail and propel the performers around the space.
Having developed over such a long period, the show itself has these multiple layers. Peel back a coat and you’ll find a jacket or a jumper. For Curry, “it’s about how the process can be seen in the show somehow”. Beneath the images on stage there is a richly textured history of development, play, feedback and reflection. Looking back across the process, the actors can track the evolution of these moments and how they have been refined through the cycle of exploring, sharing and polishing. Harris Cain, who plays BT, singles out one particular scene that demonstrates this:
“There’s a scene where BT plays grown-ups and he’s mimicking a judge, a social worker and a teacher with the blazers. That’s come a very, very long way from the first time we presented that scene in front of an audience at the Canterbury preview where it was BT and Cleo’s characters just being teachers with coffee mugs and talking about how great BT is at running and how much faster he is than Cleo. Then that completely changed within the two weeks of rehearsal.”
From a designer's perspective, Trevenen explains that it's often about playing with images and then slowly figuring out what they might signify within the context of the show. "It feels like a bit of a puzzle with a lot of the images," she says. "You kind of have an idea about something and it takes a long time to find out what that means. It’s like an instinct, and then you suddenly discover ‘oh, it’s that, of course it’s that’." Similarly, composer and sound designer Guy Connelly was in the room throughout, where he "made offers of sounds and music" which evolved over the course of the process. He offers the example of his song 'Shadower', which he first introduced in the early R&D workshops, and elements of which were retained and used in key moments of the show.
The experience of the show is layered for audiences too. Depending on the identities and life experiences they bring with them, spectators might access different levels of meaning. For young audience members, it will be different to watch depending on whether they live with their birth parents, whether they’re fostered, whether they have been adopted, whether or not they’ve had contact with the care system through friends or family members. Likewise, adults will respond differently to the show based on their own experiences of caring and being cared for.
“We laughed and cried along with the characters. The subject is something that not many children know about, which makes it so important for them to understand and this really brought the setting to life. We were able to have some in depth discussions when we got back to class and the children who have had similar life experiences felt so proud and pleased that we were discussing it."
Teacher feedback
Shadows
"We wanted to get that hard-hitting, sadder, darker content in it, because we didn’t want to shy away from the reality of these narratives"
Shireen Mula, dramaturg and writer in the room
From the moment that BT engages young audience members in games as they enter the theatre, Belongings is an inherently playful show. This reflects the process, which constantly used play as a way of forming relationships, exploring ideas and generating material. But it was equally important to honour the reality of the young co-creators’ experiences, which are not all fun and games.
Reflecting back on the initial workshop with the co-creators, Brooker captures this duality. She remembers the young people’s “playfulness”, but also stresses that “there was this real dark and sad and difficult side”. It was essential that the show captured this side of life in the care system, while holding both the co-creators and the eventual audiences.
Throughout the process, lots of care and effort went into facilitating a safe and supportive space, gradually building trust with the co-creators. Staley and Brooker were central to this, acting as a constant presence in all the sessions with the young co-creators. For Curry, it's all about the environment that the creative team builds in the workshops: “You create an atmosphere so after the eighth session someone can say - which happened in this show - ‘I dream in shadows so you have to have shadows in there’.”
Shadows became another central image in the performance, suggesting the darkness that the three young characters have experienced in their lives. The initial prompt came from Billy. “I brought in the idea of the use of shadows in the play,” he recalls. “As we progressed on that, everybody added their own little ideas to build up that idea.” In dream sequences within the show, the characters encounter a world of shadowy objects that take on a life of their own. Without ever being made explicit, these moments give form to the fears and anxieties felt by Cleo, Leila and BT.
Although the show is made for young audiences, the company didn’t want to over-simplify the story they were telling. As Curry explains, “all of Tangled Feet’s work is about trying to understand the complexities, the tensions, the strangeness, the joy and the tragedy of being alive, and I didn’t want to not do that with making work for young people”. The actors agree that it’s important not to talk down to the children watching. Jesse Bateson, who plays Leila, points out that “kids are clever and have feelings and emotions and just to name that and to share that is really important, and to not be patronising about it”. They also believe that young audiences can handle more than adults might think. “We need to give kids more credit,” insists Carla Garratt, who plays Cleo. “It’s important to get gritty with kids so they can be like ‘oh, I feel seen’.”
Part of that is also allowing audiences to take away their own impressions. As Eversden explains, “it’s really important in all of our work with Tangled Feet that we leave our audience with questions, that we don’t tie everything in a bow, that we leave them thinking about their own lives”. Mula adds that, in Belongings, “we’re quite ambiguous and the reason is to allow the audience members to put their own interpretation onto that and to use their imagination”.
This darkness and ambiguity brings with it a duty of care. Another aspect of the process is thinking about the experience of young audience members beyond the performance itself. Tangled Feet and Rowan Tree have created a detailed resource pack to accompany the show, full of questions and creative activities for adults and young people to work through together. Young audience members are invited to write messages to the characters in the show and to imaginatively explore any difficult feelings that the performance may have stirred up.
Within the performance itself, meanwhile, the stage manager emerged as an unexpected caring figure. While Belongings focuses on children in care, leaving the adult characters offstage, during rehearsals and early performances stage manager Josephine Tremelling started to represent the role of the foster carer looking after Cleo, Leila and BT. As well as holding the performance itself, the stage manager - who remains visible on stage throughout - provides a similar sense of structure and safety within the narrative of the show.
This is the kind of detail that can only emerge organically from the care underpinning the process. As Bateson notes, that seeps into the performance in subtle ways: “because there was so much care put into the process and making sure that all of those stories and journeys are held in quite a gentle way, even if they are emotionally intense, they still feel safe within us telling it”. From Rowan Tree’s perspective, it is this sense of care at every step, and for everyone involved in the process, that makes Belongings what it is:
“The whole of the Tangled Feet crew understood fully that if the six young co-creators were really held at the centre of everything, and in holding those six young people at the centre of everything, they were really holding children in care at the centre of everything, which was key to the show’s success.”
Justine Staley, Rowan Tree Dramatherapy
“Thank you for transporting us to another world, for allowing us to explore complex emotions in a safe space.”
Teacher feedback
Parachute
It starts with play and it ends with play.
Throughout Belongings, Cleo carries a parachute in her backpack. It’s her safety net - the thing that will protect her if she trips and falls. But when we first meet her, the parachute is broken. It no longer works and she’s left flailing in freefall. The show follows her journey to try and fix the parachute - to mend her relationship with her mum, who has been struggling to care for her. But eventually, Cleo learns to engage with this central object in a completely different way. Together with Leila and BT - and, eventually, young members of the audience - she inhabits the parachute as a space of playful exploration.
This is dramatherapy in action. As Mula explains, “something that had caused [Cleo] trauma, or continues to cause her trauma, is no longer scary to her, but it’s something that is still a part of her in that she wears the parachute but now she has more agency and more control over it”. The process of gaining agency over difficult experiences is central to dramatherapy, as Curry explains:
“I said to Justine, tell me what happens in dramatherapy, talk me through it. And she said this thing about trying to find some sort of metaphor - it might be an image, it might be a place, it might be a character, it might be a story - that that young person has offered up that articulates their life. And then they have to get inside it and they have to open it and realise that whatever has happened to them has also made them them, and it’s both really hard but also a superpower because it’s unique.”
The trust that Cleo builds with BT and Leila and the transformation she undergoes with her trauma are both mirrored in the making of the show and its reception. Throughout the creative process, Tangled Feet worked with the young co-creators to build a safe environment in which they could explore the experiences of children in care through metaphor, image and play. “That’s what co-creation means to us,” says Eversden, “creating a whole company where [the young co-creators] feel empowered and safe and free in the space to give their opinion, and also for the creative team to learn from them and hear and witness all of those things first-hand.”
Curry agrees that “it is dramatherapy in many respects, because it’s about metaphor, images, character”. Trevenen echoes this when describing her role in the R&D process as the designer: “I’m thinking about the dynamic potential of the objects and the dynamic potential of materials, in the same way that if you offer something into a dramatherapy session, it’s always a tool to reflect a different part of your experience rather than it being the object itself.”
But when working with the co-creators during the process it was crucial to maintain a distinction between dramatherapeutic principles, which informed the way the show was made, and dramatherapy as a practice. In workshops, it was made clear to the young people that these were not dramatherapy sessions. It was not about exploring their own direct life experiences - as they would do in dramatherapy - but instead about finding truthful ways to tell a fictional story about life in the care system.
As well as using and displaying dramatherapeutic principles, Belongings is designed to be therapeutic for audiences, following the model of therapeutic theatre. Ramsden explains:
“The idea behind therapeutic theatre is that the audience watch something that then they are able to step into, so they’re authors of their own experience, even if that’s just in reflection, but ideally you literally step into the world that you’ve just watched so you inhabit what you’ve witnessed. So it’s more of a dialogue; as opposed to being a passive spectator you become an active engager.”
This stepping into the world of the show happens in a very literal sense at the end of Belongings, as spectators are invited to join Cleo, Leila and BT on stage and play with them under the parachute. As Mula puts it, “the audience comes in and is able to be a part of the narrative, so they’re no longer, one might say, passive or inactive as listeners or watchers, but they have more agency in that they become able to be a part of the show”. This continues in the workshops that Eversden runs for groups of children after seeing the show, as they are invited to inhabit the world of Belongings through imaginative exercises.
Once again, play is central, as it has been throughout the process. This is something the actors emphasise when discussing their experiences of working on Belongings. “We just get to play,” says Garratt, recalling the R&D workshops, “and we’ll explore like children would.” Contrasting this process with other theatre-making projects, in which “things can get quite knotted and inward and a bit claustrophobic and confusing”, Bateson stresses the sense of freedom and possibility within Tangled Feet’s way of working: “it’s like there’s so much space and it kind of feels like a big collaborative playground that doesn’t have fences. There’s so much space to explore and play but also these things that are in the middle that you can use to play on.”
Long-term enquiry
This work - and play - can only happen when given time and space. This is something I hear again and again from everyone who worked on Belongings: the gradual, drawn-out, cyclical process allows for trust to be built and for things to emerge slowly and organically, cohering in a way that would not be possible on a shorter project. Over time, what started as simply playing games turns into something much richer and more complex - but still with that core of playfulness.
"[Co-creation means] continuing to create loops of feedback between our collaborators and our own creative responses, right up until the opening of the show, and beyond. It is vitally important for this work to be authentic to [the young people's] experience and we felt a very strong sense of responsibility towards maintaining this, in both what we make and how we make it [...] There is a stronger likelihood of creating work which is genuinely representative of unheard voices and experiences, rather than what we imagine them to be."
Guy Connelly, composer and sound designer
"You have a long time to really sit with the ideas, sit with the experiences that it brings up for you. [...] You find you have more cohesive work when everyone is coming to the table from the start, and with the amount of time you give the work space enough to make the right decisions for the show."
Becky-Dee Trevenen, designer
Tangled Feet are keen to carry on using a therapeutic and reflective practice of co-creation to explore the complex experiences of childhood. They are currently exploring making new work for younger audiences through their dramatherapeutic work with school refusers, vulnerable young people who have experienced trauma, and those at risk.
Cast & Creative Team
Leila: Jesse Bateson
BT: Harris Cain
Cleo: Carla Garratt
Director: Nathan Curry
Writer in the Room/Dramaturg: Shireen Mula
Designer: Becky-Dee Trevenen
Composer and Sound Designer: Guy Connelly
Lighting Designer: Sarah Readman
Rowan Tree Dramatherapists: Bryony Brooker, Justine Staley
Tangled Feet Dramatherapist: Alex Ramsden
Production Stage Manager: Josephine Tremelling
Assistant Stage Manager: Adam Lovelock
Assistant Director: Molly Sims
Creative Consultant: Pedro de Senna
Creative Advisors: Adam Harris, Branden Taylor-Norman, Sabin Limbu, Billy, Henry, Charlotte
Tangled Feet Participation Director: Emily Eversden
Catherine Love is an arts journalist, theatre critic and academic. She is Lecturer in Theatre in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York and she regularly reviews theatre for the Guardian.