Pete Lannon of SUPERFAN was selected in July 2018 to develop FEELS through Imaginate's Accelerator programme. He spent two weeks in development in November that year supported through a residency with The Work Room and Platform, in collaboration with deviser/performers Aby Watson, Mark Bleakley, Claricia Parinussa and Craig Manson, performer/sound designer Greg Sinclair, and designer Mamoru Iriguchi.
He focused on the following main strands of enquiry throughout the creative process:
- Exploring the differences between how we are told to express emotion depending on our perceived identities and how we really feel
- The ways in which our emotional encounters are becoming ‘scripted’ by the media we consume, and how this is different from how we might naturally behave
- The absence in particular of men openly talking about or expressing love, and being in love, in the stories we see repeated in our culture
- The idea of ‘bad’ emotions that are deemed socially uncomfortable, forbidden or unsightly despite being natural (sadness, anger, grief, fear, loneliness) and the categorisation of other emotions as positive or good, and the ways that these can be used to control us or sell us things or perpetuate harmful narratives about ourselves
- Queering the boundaries between gender and the expression of emotion
How these enquiries relates to children’s experiences of emotion and their gender