Wig show workouts! voice-dance workouts for children
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You can be what you want to be. Style your voice like hair, style your hair like voice, dance it out, voice it out, work it out! Check out our Wig Show Workouts - all for you to enjoy from home, from school, during lockdowns and beyond! Below, the Wig Show Warmup, and Wig Show Workouts 1 to 3. Exercise those voices and bodies and wigs!!!!
what are the wig show workouts?
We were making a show about wigs, dancing, and dancing voices for children. Then, along came Covid-19. We had to stop. Then, along came home video workouts for kids, Joe Wicks, and plenty of other online ways to get the body and mind active when penned up at home, or in socially distanced school. We thought - well, we can’t finish the show, but we can use our show to make you a workout! So, be what you like, you can be anything, everything! Style your voice like hair! Style your hair like voice! Dance your hair out, your voice out… don’t worry about sounding or looking ‘right!’ These Wig Show Workouts only ask for enjoyment, expression, and your particular uniqueness. Voice, dance, and wig along with us.
WHAT is the show concept? what will we bring back after covid?
Wig Show is a voice-dance performance! Wig Show is a participatory romp through voice and identity for children! Wig Show is interactive! Two performers try on, juggle, make rhythms from, do dances with, animate, make crazy vocal sound from, and even ‘sing’ the voices of: no fewer than 56 wigs. Sometimes - they even try them on. Often, they invite the children seated in front of them to make sounds too, and in older groups, to dance their hands in the air and join in the choreography of voice and body.
Wig Show explores the ways identity doesn’t have to be fixed, and the ways we can explore identity through our lifetimes, with a particular focus on opening up possibilities to move outside of the limits imposed by gender. It’s gently, goofily activist show, that invites us to see hairstyling and voice as… one and the same!
A significant side benefit is that children explore the wonderful world of the link between movement and the creation of vocal sound - and through so doing, an understanding of playful phonetics, voice use, and the coordination of movement is enhanced.
WHO IS IT FOR?
We are making two versions of the performance. One is for children 3-6. Another is for 6-11 year olds. Test showings have been trialled at The Place in London and Weld, Stockholm.
Why does it matter?
Voices do much more than we let them do. What happens when we invite children to witness adults playing with what else voices can do in a dynamic movement environment, especially when the adults change character, posture and movement and find new voices to match them? What happens when we invite them to invent, rather than reproduce sound? The idea that identity is fixed, that language is fixed, and that (gendered) voices are fixed, might just be challenged, in a spirit of fun and excitement.
