Children’s Games was an evening-length performance combining cinematic images with sung and spoken voice, abstract sound, and performative actions. The piece drew inspiration from the 1560 Breughel painting of the same name, and the 1970 Truffaut film, The Wild Child.
Children’s Games celebrated the associative, fragmentary and irrational aspects of play and explored the traumatic colonizations of wild space. Onstage, a chorus dressed in the medieval garb of the Breughel painting conduct vocal games and patterns.
Video projections, recorded sound and live voices mingle before giving way to an enigmatic noise band.
A half-hour, single-channel video version was also created:
A group of teenagers live in the forest, where they occupy themselves with both age-old and newly-invented games, songs and gestures. They are joined by an observant but wary Wild Child and the cultural anthropologist Snow White. The feral child is captured by a scientist, brought to a lab, and trained in washing, dressing and speaking through extended acts of performed mimicry. Later, the scientist visits a medium, where a conversation with the wild child is recorded through the ether.
Videography: Dicky Dahl
Oct. – Nov., 2011, The mOuth Studio
Portland, OR
Seth Nehil 
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