a guide to kneehigh

“Theatre should be like stepping onto a tightrope every night not plodding down a well trodden path.

Even when you’re on your 300th performance there should still be a sense of spontaneity, a fizz of adrenaline and a feeling that the actors themselves don’t quite know what’s going to happen. It’s easier to shake things up and find freshness with new and more devised work (we all know what happens at the end of Romeo and Juliet before it even starts ). As a performer I never subvert the story or the focus but I often shake things up, change rhythms, find something new.”

Mike Shepherd
Founder of Kneehigh

Kneehigh Theatre’s approach is valuable not just for young theatre makers but, in an increasingly anxious world, all young people. The resources will support teachers to understand and create for their students the environment that enabled Kneehigh to make their best creative work:

• To teach immeasurability - because if it can’t be measured it is probably good for you.

• To counter anxiety - because we need a safe, free place where we are not strangled by expectations.

• To grow imagination - because it is the source of all human achievement.

Understanding and having the opportunity whilst at school & university to engage with Kneehigh’s values of joy, bravery, flexibility, generosity, wonder and play would be a gift to theatre makers, but also to any child or young person encountering their work. This is why we have called it an ‘Active Archive’, because it must be more than a repository for memories, it must find ways to share a set of values, a process and a spirit.

WATCH THIS SPACE for a Learning Guide written and curated by Susie Ferguson with contributions from Kyla Goodey, Carl Grose, Sue Hill, Giles King, Anna Murphy, Emma Rice, Ian Ross, Mike Shepherd, Steve Tanner, Sarah Wright, Jemima Yong and Sarah Jane at Falmouth University.