SCHOOLYARD EDUCATION

When someone like Shaun Parker declares a project the most rewarding of his extensive and often glittering career, you know it’s time to take notice. Enter The Yard, his award-winning physical theatre collaboration with 20 migrant and refugee teenagers from Sydney’s multicultural west.

Inspired by the rough and tumble of the outer suburban schoolyard and the unmasked savagery of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, The Yard is an edgy, almost documentary work of dance, sport and acrobatics.

“this project has felt full of both uncertainty and joy. It’s real, it’s changed lives and that’s what I love about it.”

The Yard is also a loaded work, rippling with contemporary socio-political themes regarding bullying, cultural conflict and the migrant/refugee experience. As Parker observes, “This work is like a microcosm. It’s set in a schoolyard but look at what’s going on in the world at the moment; this whole Gaza Strip thing.”

While we may be tempted to think of the wider politics as being an adult overlay, Parker insists the piece was very much driven by the performers themselves. “All of the stories come from them. I simply worked for weeks discussing them and physicalising them and they then became the piece. Being able to tell their stories in the way they have has been really healing for them, as well as being really compelling theatre.”

The Yard is also a showcase of street dance prowess. As someone who’s “been there and done that” over the length of his career, Parker is nonetheless hugely impressed by the vigour and athleticism of his teenage cast. “These guys are incredibly raw dancers. They teach themselves, they learn off YouTube, they get together in the schoolyard and, y’know, they’ve got a lot of time on their hands because they live in an area of Sydney that’s almost an hour-and-a-half drive out of the city. There’s not much to do out there so these teenagers just invent.”

With its popping, locking, krumping and cutting (finger choreography), The Yard exudes a tough, competitive, territorial edge. And it’s not just the boys beating their adolescent chests. Parker emits a wry chuckle as he recalls a clash between Sudanese and Islander girls. “It was war.”

Yet for all that, The Yard is far from bleak. Indeed, by bringing together young people from warzones, detention centres and clashing cultures, it reveals something about the universal condition. “If our families were being blown up we’d probably react angrily too,” Parker argues. “Here we are in safe little Australia sometimes preaching about how things should be but we haven’t lived what some of these kids have lived.”

13 - 16 Aug, Arts Centre, Fairfax Studio