Lookout is an award-winning piece of socially-enaged performance that invites an adult audience to meet with a group of local children somewhere high-up overlooking a town or city to participate in a one-to-one encounter in which together they look out at the view and imagine how the place they see before them will be different many years in the future.

The project has been presented with different groups of children in over 20 towns and cities on five different continents, from Sao Paulo to Shanghai and Cairo to Llandudno. We have imagined the future together on the rooftops of sky scrapers, on hillsides and car parks, on the terrace of a castle in Salzburg and the top of a Soviet-era television tower in Riga. In the process the children we have worked with have had the opportunity to share their concerns about climate change, housing bubbles, homelessness, graffiti, mobile phones, and much more besides.

Together performer and audience member look out at the city and imagine its future. The conversation they share is a quiet journey through time guided by the streets and landmarks laid out before them.

Moving between architecture and urban planning, ecology and science fiction, and disaster scenarios and imagined utopias, the project explores the many different versions of the city, past present and future, that we all inhabit.

It is an exchange between two people who might not normally meet, and an attempt to consider big questions in a small way. Developed through a series of workshops with local children, each new version of the piece is unique to the city it is created in and the people who call that place home.

Despite having presented the project many times over, we continue to love and tour the work. Every new group of children we meet bringing something new and unexpected to its simple artistic blueprint.

Created by Andy Field & Beckie Darlington

Music by Tom Parkinson

Dramaturgy by Sibylle Peters

Originally commissioned by The Arches, Glasgow