Art/Stage Review - Of All The People In All The World
Showing between Thursday 14th and Saturday 16th May 2009 @ Bridewell Island, Bristol
Showing as part of Mayfest 2009, Bristol’s festival of contemporary theatre
When a number increases outside the realm of our normal comprehension, say above the number of people in our workplace or facebook figures, it becomes increasingly difficult to visualise it and therefore to really understand it. What does 250,000 mean when it’s not the rapidly decreasing value of our town house in Totterdown? 5,000 people die in a natural disaster or 50,000 people die – what’s the difference? What does 20 million look like in comparison to 20 billion? They’re just digits, numbers on a spreadsheet, they loose all meaning.
All the people in the world – a pile of rice anyone? Ok, so essentially that is exactly what it is, lots of piles of rice in a room. What could I possibly want with that? Well, egg-fried, chicken fried…har-de-har-har…the jokes could go on and on, but take 15 minutes out of your day to see the point that Stan’s Café are trying to make, successfully in my opinion.
Stan’s Café do no more than make abstract statistics tangible and place them in careful relation to each other. One grain of rice represents one human being. It’s simple and quite beautiful, breathing life into statistics.
Everyone born in the world today
All the millionaires in the UK
People with clean water in Chad
Everyone on Death Row
The capacity of Old Trafford
People who have died in space
Who knew that the amount of people in prison around the world is comparable to the number of people who live in gated communities in the States and on reflection, who are they being protected from, or who are we protecting against them?
Pick up a grain of rice, contemplate your part in all of this. Bristol focused statistics concentrate on the traffic problem; how come so few people cycle in the UK’s first ‘Cycling City’? The truth is more alarming, Bristol cyclists are great and our figures, in comparison, are pretty high; what are other cities doing? There is scope to wax lyrical on all the statistics highlighted by Stan’s Café, the point is just get down there and experience it for yourself.
Faye Westrop
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