Playing experimented with staging and the collective production of space through theatre and architectural model making.
In the autumn term of 2015, Art School invited artists Elaine Leader and Sarah Pierce to work with art teacher Turlough O’Donnell and a group of transition year students in Blessington Community College. The project title casually emerged from one artist’s interest in showing the students Jacques Tati’s seminal film Playtime and the other artist’s impulse to work with the students to develop a play.
Playing took form through a set of workshops hosted by each artist. For Pierce’s, she used Bertolt Brecht’s experimental plays without an audience as a starting point to develop a new work with the students in which they would be the authors, cast and audience. This resulted in a one-time-only performance titled The Square, which was re-staged as part of the exhibition It’s Very New School in 2017. For Leader’s, she used her own work as a framework within which the students explored themes related to the built environment, developing a series of models before working with the students to produce larger-scale interventions that altered the architecture of the school.