Play and exploration - creating new work with children and young people

Published on 1 July 2025.

We caught up with Lizzy Stephens, our Artistic Director, to find out more about the research and development for two new pieces of theatre, and how we are involving children, young people and our community in the creation of the work.

Can you tell us about the research and development that has been taking place over the last few months? What is being developed?

We are very excited to be developing two new pieces of touring work – one for schools and the other for early years. Both will feature a performance AND some creative play for audiences.

Last June we published a blog about our direction of travel and our plans to re-imagine what it means to create theatre with and for children and young people. How has this worked in action over the last year?

We began by exploring how to work more deeply with children, young people and our community in the creation of our work through our Winter Lights project.

Starting in 2024, inspired by the themes of “joy and light”, children, young people, members of the community, local schools, artists and staff have come together to contribute to the process. This included 3 days of Research & Development (R&D) in our studio wit young people and artists/adults in February. These days were spent gloriously playing, improvising and discussing how we might create a new offer for schools that felt innovative, exciting and based on what the young people wanted.

Artist and child taking part in our schools R&D session. Photo by Edward Felton.

The next phase was heading down to Alibi as part of their What If? Festival, to do some further R&D with school pupils and teachers. This was more focused exploration about the setting for the piece, the characters in it and what might happen in the story. It was a brilliant couple of days of imaginative play with pupils and artists.

For our recent early years R&D we had children and families present for 3 out of the 4 days. It was refreshing and inspiring, starting our week with some child-led activity – watching babies and toddlers lead our movement and exploration of materials and seeing the artists respond.

Our next phase was exploring ideas in a nursery setting, with a higher ratio of children, early years practitioners and less artists. We allowed time and space for child-led creative play, building on the work the artists had done previously. This was followed by some research into practice, approaches and interrogation into what we want to focus our exploration on - supported by some impact evaluation from Lucy Cassidy and some knowledge exchange with Theatre Hullabaloo – based in Darlington and making brilliant work for young audiences.

Who are the children, young people and families that we’ve been working with on the recent R&D? How have we involved them as genuine collaborators in the process?

We were really keen to explore different ways of engaging with children, young people and families in our development process, making it more than just involving children in a workshop.

For phase 1 of our schools R&D we worked with 9 young people who have previously engaged with us through our Youth Theatre or holiday programme. They varied in age and had not all worked together before.

Our second phase was working with 83 pupils from Key Stage 1 and 2, from two different Exeter based schools. Our final phase was working with 45 pupils from a local Bristol school.

Participants in our early years R&D session. Photo by Edward Felton.

For phase one of our early years R&D we had three separate sessions that included families with children aged 0-3. These included:

- local parents of children attending our free holiday workshop and food activity

- local families that attend and are supported by our local Family Hub

- family and friends of Travelling Light

A large percentage of these had never engaged with us before or been in our studio.

We then went on to work with children and early years practitioners in nursery settings. This is key to enabling us to develop new partnerships and relationships. Our offers will continue to be developed working closely with teachers, early years practitioners and pupils, providing exciting opportunities for shared learning and knowledge exchange.

All our R&D work has started with and maintains opportunities for child-led creative play – an important part of all our work across the programme here at Travelling Light.

What are the next steps for the development of these pieces of work?

For our early years work, the next step is futher R&D with artists at our studio to develop the performance elements of our offer.

For our schools project it will include some time for the creative team to bring ideas together ready for a pilot tour of the work to schools in Bristol. The long-term aim is that the learning and continued development with our collaborators at Alibi will enable a larger tour to schools in Exeter too.

We will be fundraising and working with partners to make this work happen.

Artists and children taking part in our early years R&D. Photo by Edward Felton.

What are your hopes for the work? Who do you hope they will reach?

As with all our work moving forward, we hope that it will reach children, young people and families who wouldn’t otherwise experience theatre.

We are all very motivated by testing new ways of working and trialling new offers for our audiences – trying to understand what works, what feels innovative and exciting.

By making work that is designed to tour we hope to build on the learning from Igloo and reach even more children in children’s centres; as well as take work into schools, which teachers tell us is really needed.

We hope that making work that covers 0-11 years will provide the opportunity for us to welcome lots of new audiences across the South West, as well as provide offers for our established community and education partners in schools, nurseries and family hubs.

How both these new offers progress into 2026 is something we are all very excited about.