Tangle

Tangle is a huge, fun, totally interactive elastic weaving event, created live and on the spot by children and their families. It’s part spectacular live art, part performance, part playground and all chaos.

Participants are each given a ball of soft elastic to weave around and through 24 tall slender golden poles. Strand by strand the kids create a dense multi-coloured landscape, tangled and interwoven to make a place where they can play and explore and bounce.

Tangle takes individual paths and interconnects them to form a hilarious metaphor for life.

Featuring live music, this beautiful event is a place where children take control and create a giant shared abstract artwork that everyone owns and anyone can play in.

"This is an opportunity you rarely get to do since you can't do it at home or anywhere else." - Bethany, 13

"This is children's play invisibly directed and unfolding" - The Age, Melbourne, Australia

How Does It Work?

Imagine 25 poles of different heights, from 2.5 to 6 metres tall, set in platform bases. Each child is given a ball of elastic that they weave in and out of the poles. Gradually, the landscape fills with interconnecting lines of different colours as more and more children fill the space. As the day progresses and the weaving becomes denser, the space becomes a huge messy bouncy playground, and the children play within the stretchy mass, weaving themselves in and out of the elastic. Tangle follows Polygot’s philosophy that theatre is child’s play.

In and around the space are the Weavers, performers who follow the children’s instincts, responding to their impulses and facilitating their creations. Using big crooks, they can hoist the eslastic higher on the poles so that there is room for more weaving by more children, while creating a massive multicoloured ceiling. As the soundtrack changes – from upbeat circus music to atmospheric blips and beeps – the performers alter their movement and we see also how this affects the way the children move in the space and what they create. It is created in the moment and constantly affected by others. It’s all a giant experiment.

We can also play with colour palette – imagine the black, red and yellow of Indigenous Australia, the blues and greens of an environmental theme, the rainbow colours of Mardi Gras. The aim of the piece is simply for children to work together to create a singular, abstract, lyrical messy artwork which everyone owns.

Thematic

Tangle is a simple artwork which is a complex metaphor of intertwining lives and intentions. It is about connection and instinct. It has resonance with the themes of interlinking communities, of links between strangers, of connecting life strands and desires. We are interested in the revealing nature of the work. How does chaos affect people’s behaiviour? How do children interact and play with each other, and with adults? How does this shift and change in different cities and countries?  Tangle provides the chance for children to enter an abstract world of their own creation.

View photos in the 'Photo Gallery' tab below. 

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