When I think of the possibility of putting on a show with secondary school students I think, first of all, in their bodies being present on stage. Bodies undergoing development, awakening, in the process of beginning to recognise that they are bodies which communicate with other bodies and with themselves. I imagine teenagers entering the stage with costumes that accentuate grotesque shapes. I imagine teenagers talking to a sculpture. With the teenagers saying “What you see before you is my body. This, what I see is my body.” I imagine a process of flexible creation, in which each person finds something that they feel is important to express. Words that they really feel like saying. Words that speak not only of their physical body, but also of their mental, energetic and emotional body. I imagine teenagers analysing the shapes of their hands. A poem that talks about their hair. A dissection of what physically happens to them when they sit next to another person. I imagine them walking as if they were caricatures. Funny bodies.

An adolescent’s body is full of tension. They live under extreme external and internal pressure. Turning the meetings and the collective creation process of an iN RESiDENCE programme into a space which allows these bodies to express themselves and discover themselves can be profoundly transformative. I really enjoy allowing a process like the one described in these pages be one that gives shape to a theatre play. That the personal discoveries the teenagers make during the process have a place in the final result. That the same process of testing scripts and movements; of discovering how we feel when we say specific words or make a specific move, be the show in itself. That their bodies savour the present. That they discover what it is to act on a stage.