As in the earlier Turning Towers, a collaboration between Milk Crate and public housing tenants, fragments of dialogue and ideas collected in workshop situations are crafted into a script presenting the possible future of our changing environment. By choosing the framework of a nightly news program, hosted by a bow-tied and very professional presenter, Mt Carmel’s performance covered several important and pressing topics.
Problems of the present such as the pressure of traffic and the high cost of household power are in the process of being solved by ingenious methods. The clever and environmentally aware people of the future are working on a method of turning rubbish into electricity (if only), resolving both the problems of increased waste and escalating electricity prices at once. Teleporting vehicles and “office pods” are to overcome the stress of increased traffic and the dislocation of road construction (a close-at hand issue), and the length of time spent commuting to workplaces.
Other issues, more student-oriented, were tackled with similar creativity. The vexed question of “what’s for lunch? Not sandwiches again” was solved by personal drone delivery of individually tailored lunches of high-energy foods. Present complaints made about the noise of skateboards and skateboard parks were consigned to the past as a real hover board, one that actually flies, is finally perfected.
Overall, the future as envisaged is very much up-in-the-air: hover highways, hovercraft, hover boards. Waterloo, as one panel in the lovely backdrop suggests, was once an industrial suburb, and from the school’s serene little garden, the new version of this once working-class, inner-urban area, dominated by tall shiny towers and cranes can be observed in the making. We hope there will be space always for small communities with high hopes for the future.
