‘…something amazing that has opened my eyes and will stay with me for a very long time.’ {Audience member: 2017}.

Contracted as part of my University degree, Welcome to Pleasure Island always felt more than a marked assignment. Alongside fellow co-collaborators, I devised and performed, creating a world of embodied characters and personas, trust and betrayal, lightness and misery, misunderstanding and despair. The cylindrical cycle of human trafficking informed the performance construction at every stage – the underlying aim: demonstrate to audiences how this issue is rife, how easily young people can slip into the manipulation and abuse of traffickers and how, with support, victims can reclaim their own narrative. The harsh reality and enormity of this multi-layered issue can never be presented in its entirety: our grounding ethics of this issue-based piece was to give a small insight into these realities that are happening all around us, as honestly as possible, arming the local community with the knowledge to recognise and ultimately resist.

Performed to multiple student year groups allowing potentially vulnerable young people exploration of this surreal, immersive and multi-dimensional world. This mesmerising well-known world of fairy tale and happy ever after, meeting with the dark, true and hidden worlds of stark reality, was built from scratch, embracing elements of my practise such as honesty and a respect for lived narrative, humour, storytelling and multimedia techniques. Illuminating difficult topics in this way allows audiences a safe platform to digest the horrors, truths and realness of issues such as modern-day slavery.