A Rain Walk is a performance that takes the form of a walk through your own neighbourhood in the pouring rain. You are guided on your walk by the voices of children, who invite you to observe, imagine and play in the familiar streets around your home. 

Each new version of the project is created with a group of young people from different places, either places within the same country or places in different countries entirely. Each child is separately sent a recording device and a set of activity packs full of things to go out and record, and we meet each day for workshops via Zoom to talk together about the project. We then edit these recordings together into a single audio track, with a soundtrack created for the project by artist and musician Christopher Brett Bailey. 

The show is designed for an audience of both adults and families. Their first encounter with the show is a small box that arrives in the post containing a beautifully designed booklet, a glass vial for catching the rain and a link to a webpage where they can download the audio track. Then they have to wait, until a time when it is raining and they can begin their walk.

Conceived and first created during the coronavirus pandemic, A Rain Walk is an invitation to experience the banality of a rainy street with a different kind of concentration and an attempt at connectedness and empathy in a moment of profound change. The project uses our shared experience of the rain as a way of bringing people together across divisions of geography, age and culture, asking all of us to temporarily give ourselves up to the natural rhythms of the weather as a way of re-imagining our relationship to the world around us.

The first version of the project was created in collaboration with children across Ireland and the UK. A second version of the project was later created with children in Australia and New Zealand, with support from Melbourne Festival, Art Play and Festival of Colour, Wanaka.

Created by Andy Field & Beckie Darlington

Music by Christopher Brett Bailey

Additional audio support from Tom Parkinson

Design by Will Brady

Commisioned by Dublin Fringe, ARK Dublin, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and The Place