All-female Team Uses New Play to Explore Children's Grief and Trauma at Sydney Fringe

A new devised play from an all-female team will tackle the effect and experience of grief and trauma on children at the Sydney Fringe next month.

From independent collective Montague Basement, Tammy & Kite is devised and performed by Sydney-based artists Hannah Cox and Caitlin West, and produced by Imogen Gardam. The show will also feature a soundscape from emerging female composers, Josephine Gibson and Alexis Weaver.

"It's important for me to build and work with all-female teams where possible," producer Imogen Gardam explains. "For a play that explores young girls, it was even more important to work with female voices that don't need to assert themselves, and cam work comfortably."
The play follows Kite, who is nine years old and has a full life - of friends, of school, of handball and Healthy Harold. But every afternoon when she comes home from school, a darker side of her world threatens to creep in.
In her bedroom, where the real and the imaginary collide, Kite uses the only tool she has - play - to learn how to articulate and navigate a world that is bigger and more unpredictable than she can understand.

"Most children use play and the imagination as key tools for growth and development. They learn new skills through play and through acting out what they see others do," West explains.

"In Tammy & Kite, we explore the power of a child's imagination, not only as a tool for creative expression, but as a way of articulating pain and navigating grief. In this piece, the imaginary is used not as a way to sidestep or trivialise the pain of a child who has experienced loss, but as a way to express it."

The work will use puppets, light, music and shadow to recreate the world of a child's imagination.

"Children are so often over-simplified," Cox explains. "By exploring the process of grief from a child's point of view we are seeking to look back on and legitimise the child's voice, which is so often lost in the louder voices of the adults around them."
"Through this piece, we hope to give voice to something that is so often drowned out by the adult world, and to legitimise and learn from the ways in which children experience and express loss, grief and pain."

Tammy & Kite will be performed at the Erskineville Town Hall from the 13-17 of September at 7:00pm.
For more info and ticket info visit: montaguebasement.com/tickets

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