What Did I Miss?
The Ark
Schools Shows: Friday 11 June at 10.30am & 12.45pm
Public Shows: Saturday 12 June at 7.30pm & Sunday 13 June at 2.30pm
Locations: Online, nationwide
Ticketing: Booking online at ark.ie to receive your unique code to access the show.
Age Suitability: 10+
Streaming live from The Ark in Dublin directly to homes and schools across the country, this new show by The Ark Artist in Residence, Shaun Dunne, offers a window into children’s experience of the pandemic and the milestones they’ve missed along the way.
Kyla is throwing a party on her street. Not just any party. It’s a graduation ceremony. It’ll be mad to see the kids from her old class again after so long. Summer 2020 was literally endless.
Now that they’re all in first year, Kyla wants to get the old gang back together. She’s made caps, she has gowns, and she’s even prepared a speech. But there’s one visitor she’s not expecting…
Developed and informed by ongoing collaborative work with The Ark’s Children’s Council, What Did I Miss? is a celebration of rites of passage, exploring how we reconnect as we adapt to a new way of life. As we reach the end of a second disrupted school year and a new class graduates from primary school, Kyla’s story will resonate with even more children as they see a young character create her own new rituals of graduation.
Joining Sarah Morris in the cast, The Ark is excited to introduce newcomer and former Children’s Council member Naomi Moonveld-Nkosi as Kyla, a capable and determined girl who discovers she’s not the only one attempting to bridge the divides left by lockdown.
Commissioned & Produced by The Ark in association with Dublin Theatre Festival
Behind the Scenes of What Did I Miss?
Children are invited to share what they missed during lockdown
This June, The Ark and Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh are exploring and sharing children’s experience of lockdown in a number of ways. At its centre, are free live streamed performances of the new show What Did I Miss? by Shaun Dunne, which offers a window into children’s experience of the pandemic and the milestones they’ve missed along the way. Meanwhile, a schools engagement programme encourages children to share how it was for them.
The Ark, in partnership with Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh will also be giving voice to some of the experiences of children in Ireland to the Government. On 22 June, children from The Ark Children’s Council will present to the Oireachtas Committee on Children, Disability, Equality and Integration, sharing what the children of Ireland have told them about their experiences of lockdown. To help inform this presentation and to represent as many children as possible, we are now calling for children right across the island of Ireland to send us stories of something they missed due to lockdown.
It could be meeting friends, family, a special event, a milestone in their lives, a landmark date – anything at all that they missed, we want to hear about it!
Submissions will be collated and considered by the Children’s Council. They will then write a short speech highlighting some of the things children missed, which they will deliver to the Oireachtas Committee on 22 June.
This free show will be live-streamed and accompanied by a national engagement project reaching out to children in primary schools across the country to deliver a unique child-authored snapshot of their experience of life during the pandemic. In addition to the classes participating in the workshop programme, schools across Ireland are invited to take part and contribute to the project using The Ark’s bespoke activity pack, available here.