‘Burlap’ is the working title for an ongoing research and development project working with young people and the organisations and professionals that support them to explore themes, stories, characters, settings and outdoor performance spaces and places. This process  involves them at a very early stage of development in an age appropriate critical response process, drawing on and valuing their insights and creativity.

The resulting outdoor interactive play will be accompanied by an optional creative arts workshop programme focussing on: making puppets out of recycled plastics and compostable materials, and using compostable cups to grow crops, flowers or trees.

Concept: Burlap is a young dragon living in a cafe underneath the coffee machine. He is made of fully compostable cups and sacking and his world is also constructed of compostable materials. Burlap will live for hundreds or maybe thousands of years but, he needs help to find his story.

The world is changing and sometimes he feels that it is hard to imagine what these changes might mean or that there is anything we can do to influence them. In the research and development phase we are engaging with young children in working out what Burlap’s story will be as he grows up and how we can help make his outcomes better.

The first phase of this project involved working with P1 pupils in Castleview Primary School exploring ideas around planting, working and learning outdoors creatively, making performance sequences and stories.

The second phase involved working with two primary 4 classes in Castleview Primary School to create a stage play involving puppetry, petry, performance, movement, artworks, a dragon (which became a sea serpent), and looking at plastics, the environment, recycling, planting trees.

This project is aimed at creating an interactive performance for 5 to 8 year olds and their families in 2019 that is designed to be performed outdoors in forest, garden and community outdoor spaces and places. Tragic Carpet’s partner in this project is Karin Chipulina of Carr Gomm.