Are You Ready For Our Next Emergency? Buy Your Ticket For Disaster At Vogelmorn!

Every day news about emergencies unleashed by earthquakes or extreme weather events and climate change hit our screens – but how prepared are we as communities to respond?

For a new group known as The Playful Revolution one way to develop readiness is to bring people into a common space to play out a ‘real-life scenario’ together.

After a workshop directed by Alex Bonham (with local government experience of Auckland’s flooding), Sophie Jerram from Vogelmorn Community Group and inner city Wellingtonian Jack Gittings, tickets are now available for dinner and an experiential piece of disaster theatre – titled Disaster at Vogelmorn – to be held on the evening of Saturday 27 July at Vogelmorn, 93 Mornington Road, Brooklyn.

Vogelmorn Trustee and co-founder of The Playful Revolution Sophie Jerram: “People and families who join us on 27 July can, as in any emergency, expect the unexpected. They’ll arrive, just as they might in the middle of any local disaster, to a set of unknown circumstances. The challenge will be how they then respond, as a real-life community who will be meeting in this context for the first time. Facing challenges together is exciting and far more empowering than pretending they don’t exist.”

Sophie: “Sitting on our hands isn’t really an option when emergencies strike, and yet it’s very apparent that communities and neighbourhoods aren’t getting enough opportunities to practice ways to respond and to perform a duty of care to each other.

“Something that theatre and emergency response have in common, is the need for flexibility and role playing. Our hope for this event is that everyone who comes along will be able to pick up ideas and share thoughts about actions that they could put into practice in the future.

“As we’ve seen so often in the last year, emergency responses require community building at speed. It makes sense that a community that practises being together can move faster, and the experience that this brings for disaster-preparation means one less community that needs extra support later.”

The Playful Revolution has been taking inspiration from similar initiatives such as Collapse Camp. The doors to Disaster at Vogelmorn are open to people and families from any community or suburb in the Wellington region.

Tickets for Disaster at Vogelmorn, inclusive of dinner, can be found at https://events.humanitix.com/disaster-at-vogelmorn-the-dress-rehearsal

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