Feel Me-a new experience coming to the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch.

Back by popular demand, a reworked, new version of FEEL ME tours to venues around England in autumn 2024 and winter 2025, including Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch.

Using a mixture of live performance, film, projection, dance and interactive elements, Feel Me explores the different lenses through which we are told, and connect to stories we hear and read about. In Feel Me, worlds unfold from backpacks, and tents are constructed and dismantled again, each scene and location temporary, like a transient teenager in search of safety, acceptance and a new place to call home.

Talking about the inspiration for the show, the Company’s Co-Founder and Co-
Director Jemma McDonnell said: “The idea for Feel Me started in 2015 when I saw a picture of a three year old boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a beach. It was a picture I couldn’t get out of my mind, there was something in that horrifying viral image that kept making me return to the concept of empathy and what it means to feel for another. Jump forward 5 years and sat in lockdown with my own small children to take care of I decided to revisit this idea.”

The idea has since grown even further, following the show’s initial preview tour and
change of company. McDonnell elaborated: “The beauty of being a devising company and the show having a change of cast has allowed us to revisit the original show and to look at widening the lens, using the live and film elements of the show to explore through the character’s eyes, rather than the performer’s story – because that character could be anyone.

“We’ve also incorporated the new performers’ voices within the piece more. They are directly interacting with the audience more, which results in greater opportunities to discuss the barriers and complexities of empathy. It’s a show that encourages audiences to think, but ultimately empathy is about emotions and so we’ve been really working on ways in which we can encourage the audience to feel more.”

Feel Me seeks real world impact and action and achieves it with help from modern technology: as active participants within the show, audiences are gently and anonymously asked to share how they feel about the story they are witnessing at different moments using their phones, and to consider who they connect with, who they feel empathy for and why.

The data gathered will be measured using innovative software accessed by the audience during the show in a series of collaborative ‘check-in’ moments, with results creatively shared live as part of the performance. Working in collaboration with academics from Essex University, the Company is using mobile phones to measure the impact Feel Me has had on their audiences and their empathy levels immediately as well as post-show.

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