First published on 6 Jan 2012. Updated on 12 Jan 2012.
Drawing inspiration from Christos Tsiolkas’s best-selling novel The Slap, Kate Champion and Force Majeure (Not in a Million Years, The Age I’m In, Same Same But Different) conducted over 90 interviews across generations on their attitudes to parenting. Together, they’ve come up with a combination of dance and theatre with verbatim text from the interviews.
One of the key issues running throughout the performance is the stark contrast of styles in parenting. A simple game of pass-the-parcel, Champion says, reveals a lot about the gradual shift to over-parenting. “You put a prize in every layer,” Champion says. “So someone somewhere has decided children can’t cope with losing. The whole point of one person winning and other children learning that ‘it’s not my turn this time’ has been eradicated from their experience in growing up.
“I remember what it felt like to lose and really trying hard to get something and the process of understanding you can’t win everything.”
Champion hopes Never Did Me Any Harm will encourage audiences to think about the issues, and indeed their own experience, of parenting. “We’re just trying to get as many different viewpoints on this subject matter to enrich the conversation and to put a bit of a microscope under it to let the audience ask themselves if they agree or disagree.”
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