For two weeks this semester, the Palm Trees had been transformed into a space that served as a playground for kids during the day and a colorful art piece the rest of the time. It started with a few golden poles erected in the middle of the campus. The white fencing around these poles clearly marked out the play space. Over the next few days, this space was converted from an empty area into an extremely confusing and colorful art piece. This ‘art piece’ was supposed to be created completely by children running around with a ball of colorful elastic in their hands during the various designated times.

Tangled was an interactive experience wherein the participants themselves shaped the experience of the participants as well as the onlookers. Also, interestingly, every performance was not an isolated one. Each performance started from where the previous performance had left, in a sense. All the elastic tied around by the previous group was pushed up the poles and therefore the new group of participants was not engaging with the previous performers’ residue from the get go. However once they had established a pretty good base for themselves and gotten comfortable with the play space, they started using the pre-present elastic in different ways. The Polyglot participants present in the space also played a huge role in making the participating kids aware of this. This was beautifully portrayed in the last performance of the group. During the performance, the Polyglot participants pulled down all the elastic in the space and the kids interacted with this in many different ways. While the youngest ones just sat on top of it and were amused by this new, colorful floor, the relatively older ones started using it as a ladder and tried climbing up (which has been captured in the videos for which the links are posted at the end). Therefore, the play experience did not depend on just one performance. It kept building up on everything the the previous performances had left in the space as their residue. Every single performance built up on this residue.

I felt that the Polyglot participants present in the space played a very important role in making the play experience more social for the kids. I noticed this when I was a participant as well as when I was an observer. Most of the kids came into the play space and were so fascinated by the colorful ball in their hands that they did not care about who else was in the space let alone interact with others. Most kids would mark some space for themselves and be content with playing within that space. However, I saw how the Polyglot participants kept going to different areas in the play space and kept encouraging the kids to interact with each other by creating scenarios using the elastic and the kids. For a second the kids would stare at them wondering why these adults are acting like kids but would soon forget about that and join them in this new game. Therefore, as the performance progressed, the space became much more social literally with the kids being made to interact with each other and also metaphorically with everyone entering the space with individual elastic balls and creating an artwork that is built on the entangling of their paths in the play space.

Overall, it felt that the experience might have been extremely different for the participants if they were the only ones present in the space and they did not have the Polyglot participants helping them figure out new ways to interact with the space. In fact, this holds true for everyone and not just the kids. Even when our class went into the Tangled space as a group, we started by just walking around and trying to navigate through the web of elastic. It was only when they started wrapping us in elastic did we realize that this was one of the ways to interact with the space as well as with each other. I doubt that all the extra interaction with the elastic would have happened in any performance if the Polyglot participants were not present in the space. It is very interesting to note how this is completely different from some of their other performance pieces. For example, in Ants they do not interact with the kids at all but still end up creating an artwork with the kids whereas in Tangled, a huge part of the participants’ experience relied on their interaction with the Polyglot participants.

When the Polyglot Theatre Group came to our class, they had described how they take one simple element and try to create a meaningful experience for kids and their parents around it. I believe that they were able to achieve this through Tangled simply because they enabled the participating kids to engage their imagination and create something that was more than just wrapping colorful elastic around poles. When a kids walks out of the performance space, they do not remember wrapping around the elastic but rather what happened after it- creating an ocean inside the space, climbing the elastic ladder or just sitting on a fascinatingly colorful floor. The kids were free to explore the space and do whatever they want in it. The parents were excited to see the response of their children to this space. It felt like a bonding experience between the parents and their children. For some the bond was strengthened by the parents actively participating with their child to make them more comfortable in the space and for others it was about enjoying their children exploring something new and expressing themselves. Being a theatre company that focuses on creating meaningful experiences for children, it was very interesting to see that space, even after the children had left, still gave the effect of a child’s first drawing on paper- scribbles with colorful crayons. It was truly an experience made for and by the kids.

Links to videos:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mm8EfuDAjX19J_a0455It_ldwZq_uZ_J/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nUCHGuNrcMTyTQP_j1sqlGbzV8HfEv08