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As the school days wind down across the province, one Winnipeg theatre company is on a quest to search for the future alongside classrooms of elementary school students.
One Trunk Theatre’s latest show, The Future Finders, sends three artists into a classroom to devise a vision for the future as guided by students at École Provencher.
“It generally begins with the beacon flaring to life,” smiles One Trunk Theatre artist-in-residence Ben Thornsley. (The beacon is, in fact, a Kleenex box wrapped in tin foil with a Bose speaker inside making a transmission noise to announce the performer’s arrival). “We begin with like a joint fiction that all the kids are on board with, and for the next like 40 minutes, this is real. We’re time travelers from the future, we need your help and we're gonna sing a song about it or we're gonna do a game about it or we're gonna draw pictures or something.”
“There’s so many questions right now about, ‘What does the future hold? What do we want to see?’,” adds artistic producer Tanner Manson. “And the future is these six and seven year olds, and so, walking into their classrooms, playing these kind of dumb idiots from the year 3000 and just being like, “What is the alphabet? Can you teach me?’, and then they show us and then we ask them like, ‘What do they want to see in the future?’”
“It's just so, so inspiring. They know what they want to see and we just have to like listen and like not presuppose what we know what we think we know about what the future might hold.”
Each of the sessions begins with a ten-minute sketch written by Thornsley to set up the activity for the day, with the total theatre exercise taking about 45 minutes. During this process, One Trunk Theatre is gathering source material from the kids about their views for the future which will be used in future projects that the company hopes can travel to other schools in Winnipeg and beyond.
“I always find as like the writer who's working, both trying to create a ‘show’ for the kids in that like 10 minutes and also trying to create source material for us for the future is an interesting balancing act of managing magic and also having to do adult tasks and get things out of it,” notes Thornsley of the balance between present and future in The Future Finders.
“We're not presupposing any answer quite yet just because we want to I think sit with it and see what's exciting us,” says Manson about the future plans for this material, “because in every all the work that One Trunk does, we come in with questions [about] what else can theatre be."