Rambert Company's Seven for a Secret

Taking its name from the nursery rhyme about magpies, One for sorrow, Two for joy… Seven for a secret, never to be told presents the world as seen through the eyes of some mischievous children. Rambert’s world-class dancers capture the buoyancy and natural comedy of play in this uplifting work in 15 movements as the youngsters flit like grasshoppers from one idea to the next, moving seamlessly between reality and make-believe.Following their successful collaboration on The Comedy of Change in 2009, Mark Baldwin has engaged the expertise of Professor Nicky Clayton FRS once again. Her extensive knowledge of the behavioural development of children, particularly the role of play in enriching cognitive development, firstly through imitation and then reinvention or innovation, has given the creative team valuable insight. Indeed three key themes relating to behavioural development have specifically informed Seven for a secret, never to be told:

Play: Children spend a lot of time in the act of play. Fun it might be, but we now know that play is very good for the brain and that it’s only the big-brained animals that spend much of their time playing.  Young chimpanzees engage in rough and tumble play to figure out who the best fighters are and hone their own techniques, and young ravens, close relatives of the thieving magpie, pretend to hide their food to discover who is likely to steal. That is also why children often solve problems by playing games - by being little tricksters, just like those naughty magpies.

Inside vs outside: When it comes to cognitive abilities children are not miniature adults: they see the world quite differently. For a child my world is me, and my world and your world are one and the same. But as their minds develop the tension between the inside and outside world shifts in perspective, and slowly but surely children start to see the world as adults do.

Imitate or innovate: One thing that is thought to make human children unique from other animals is their spontaneous ability to imitate the actions of others, often meaningless ones – just for fun. But being a copy-cat only gets you so far; to be an individual you need to know when to innovate, when to do and see things differently and to think outside the box. That is what creativity is all about, something children have in spades.

Another strand of reinvention running through the work is a brand new score by Stephen McNeff adapted from Ravel’s rarely-performed one-act opera, L'enfant et les sortilèges. First performed in 1925, a year before Rambert was founded, McNeff has sought to reimagine the score as if Ravel was composing it today. Stephen McNeff has had past success re-inventing existing work; he was nominated for a RPS Award for his adaptation of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande that premièred at Sadler’s Wells in 2009.

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