Projects
Awareness
Awareness
A multimedia live performance about the child of an influencer.
Awareness is a collaboration between director, Liam Rees, and playwright, Beth Westbrook, about an autistic teenager whose mum is an influencer.
It's about the commodification of neurodivergence, growing up in the digital age, and the line between raising awareness and exploitation. Awareness is an experiment in live and digital theatre that aims to immerse the audience in an intimate family drama that plays out in front of the whole internet in which the private and public spheres merge collide.
Awareness will be Liam's next major experiment with live and digital storytelling after The Enlightened, which used a combination of live performance, Zoom, and a WhatsApp group to solve a true crime story in the UK and India simultaneously.
Experiment
£20,000
Aims of the Project
Throughout the project’s R&D Liam and Beth will experiment with immersive and digital tools to stage the internet for this play.
Current ideas include experimenting withwebcams, phones, and onstage 360 degree cameras to livestream the show from different perspectives. Liam and Beth will also experiment with inviting audiences to interact with the show on their phones to become commentators and voyeurs on the drama as well as sending the audience content from the family’s channel to immerse them in the word of the show before they even arrive at the theatre.
Liam and Beth hope this hybrid of live an digital performance will speak to the present moment we’re living in and also act as an accessibility tool to engage and include audiences who can’t attend in person for a variety of reasons.
Meet the artist
Liam Rees
Lead artist
he/him
Liam is a director of new writing and devised theatre. He was commissioned by HOME to create The Enlightened, a hybrid of live and digital performance that tackled true crimes cases in the UK and India simultaneously.
His latest play, The Land That Never Was, was a mix of stand-up and confessional storytelling about Gregor MacGregor, a conman who made up and sold a country. He’s an Associate Artist with Dead Centre in Dublin and recently collaborated with the Young Vic on their 5 Shorts project.
Beth Westbrook
Beth Westbrook is a neurodivergent (Autistic, ADHD, and Dyspraxic) performer and writer with chronic pain from The Wirral.
Beth’s first play SUNNY GIRL was a finalist at Hope Mill Theatre’s Through the Mill Prize 2021 and her second play AWARENESS was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2021. Her first sitcom LOST TIME was longlisted for the 2019 Funny Women’s Comedy Writing Award.
