The Dream Weaver character from Factory of Broken Dreams (2018), an immersive production exploring character-led storytelling, now informing Big Dream Weave and the potential for scaling into outdoor street performance and projection-based work.
What the audience experiences
The performance unfolds as a journey.
Audiences are guided through a sequence of encounters in unexpected places. A neighbour shares a story as if it has been waiting to be told. A towering puppet watches over the crowd from above the rooftops. Music spills from doorways that once felt ordinary. A clown threads through the audience, gently unsettling the rules of the street.
Familiar spaces begin to transform through these encounters. The everyday is re-framed, re-imagined and reanimated through performance.
At moments, audiences follow a path. At others, they pause within scenes. Occasionally, they are invited to take part — not as a task or instruction, but as a natural part of the unfolding world.
The boundary between performer and audience is intentionally porous, creating a shared experience shaped by presence, movement and attention in public space.
EVERYTHING MUST GROW
An outdoor theatre journey through the streets we imagine together
What if the street you know suddenly began to change?
A pavement becomes a riverbank.
A shopfront opens into a memory.
A high street starts to breathe, shift, and respond.
Everything Must Grow is a large-scale outdoor theatre experience that transforms public space into a moving world of story, music, puppetry and collective imagination. Audiences are not seated; they travel through the work, moving through streets, squares and civic spaces as the environment itself begins to shift around them.
Musicians from Night Magic (Norfolk & Norwich Festival, 2017) performing as a funeral march band, an early exploration of ritual and procession that informs the ‘death of the high street’ concept in Everything Must Grow.
R&D rehearsal exploring a ‘funeral for the high street’ sequence.
Form and creative language
The work combines:
Processional outdoor performance through real streets and civic spaces
Clowning and character-led encounters
Live and recorded music
Large-scale puppetry and visual spectacle
Moments of guided and spontaneous participation
Rather than a fixed stage narrative, the piece unfolds as a structured sequence of encounters. Each scene reveals a different layer of the world and its inhabitants, building a cumulative journey through space and story.
The structure is designed to be adaptable and repeatable, supporting touring across high streets, festivals and civic spaces. It can respond to different locations while maintaining a clear artistic framework.
Three clown musicians on a cherry picker during Bivouac250 (Circus250, OUT THERE Arts Festival 2018), a collaborative procession in Great Yarmouth with French company Générik Vapeur, creating pop-up performance moments throughout the parade.
Everything Must Grow responds directly to this learning. It marks a shift from gathering ideas towards shaping them into a structured outdoor production: a work that can be tested, refined through public engagement, and developed for touring. While remaining rooted in community voice and participation, the focus now is on building a clear artistic framework that supports repetition, adaptability and long-term sustainability.
Design sketch for a multi-functional large-scale puppet for Everything Must Grow, developed to adapt across processional outdoor performance and different touring environments.
The world of the work
Everything Must Grow sits in a space between celebration and unease — a world where ordinary streets become sites of memory, imagination and possibility.
It asks:
What do we carry forward from the past?
What do we want to change?
And what might we grow together in the places we share?
The tone is playful, accessible and visually rich, grounded in real voices and ideas gathered through community engagement. It is a work that invites audiences to look again at the places they think they already know.
Mini procession following Sideshow Roadshow (OUT THERE Festival, 2021), exploring audiences as active participants and the role of protest as performance within public space.
Why this work
Hocus Pocus Theatre has developed a consistent body of participatory outdoor performance presented in festivals, civic spaces and community contexts. Earlier projects such as Joyride and Lifecycle established our approach to playful, accessible work in public space, combining performance with audience participation and site-responsive storytelling.
Big Dream built on this practice at a larger scale, deepening our understanding of how communities can shape performance in public space and demonstrating a strong public appetite for participatory outdoor work. It strengthened partnerships and clarified both the artistic potential and practical challenges of this approach at scale.
A key learning from Big Dream was the need to move from open-ended consultation and development processes towards a more defined, repeatable performance structure that can be toured and adapted across different locations.
Musicians in R&D developing live musical structures for outdoor performance Everything Must Grow.