Craigroyston Primary School Artists Residency - Year 1

c. Kat Gollock
c. Kat Gollock

What makes us feel alive? What does being alive even mean? What does being alive look like? How can we be alive with all of it: good and bad?

—Eoin McKenzie

Eoin McKenzie - Lead Artist
Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir - Associate Artist

This residency took place between Sept - Dec 2019.

Working with the P7s, during our residency we explored the function of rules: who makes them, what are they for, where do they come from, and when do we follow or break them? Working between the classroom and other spaces where the expected behaviour is very different - the playground, the lunch hall, and the staff room – we found a way of better understanding all of the rules we are subjected to, their truest intentions, and how we embody them.

Some P7s said this when asked their thoughts on rules:

They are sometimes tough to follow. They are sometimes useless. They prevent us from doing bad things. They keep us from danger. They let us know what we’re doing. They are made by adults. They can be bent. They are being broken. They give us boundaries.

Using writing, performance making, choreography, and social experiments, we created a performance that interrogated who rules serve, what they offer to a group of young people at the top of their school, and what happens when we shake the rules up.