Budgets
Lesson Plans
INTRODUCTION
WELCOME TO PEACE CHILD •••
If you venture further into these pages, you enter a world where miracles happen.
Around the world, in some 10,000 performances, Peace Child has transformed the people and places it has touched. It went to the USA and Russia: the Cold War ended. It went to Central America and the Middle East: Peace broke out. It went into the inner cities, ex-Yugoslavia, Ireland, Cyprus and its energy is still engaged in sowing seeds of peace in the hearts and minds of people consumed by conflict.
We bring you here a new Peace Child 2000 specially adapted to reflect the goals of the Hague Appeal for Peace and the challenge of a new Millennium. In this script, we do not chip away at the world’s problems one by one: we suggest that, with passion and commitment, they can all be solved at once. In adapting the script, as we urge you to do, you can focus on which-ever problem is of most concern to you and your cast. Some things do not change: this pack includes a score of the original songs and lyrics which are the life blood of any Peace Child s how.· In these Production Notes, we give you the process – how to adapt, produce and promote a Peace Child show in different ways, from the smallest community show to a large-scale international production. And we tell you in more detail than ever before, the story of Peace Child – how it grew in the 1980s addressing the critical problem of how to build bridges between East and West, how it adjusted in the early 1990s to address that other endless war between humanity and the environment and how it emerged in the later 1990s trying to bridge that much deeper divide between North and South. We believe that Peace Child is now stronger and more relevant than ever.
Because of its roots in the Hague Appeal, Peace Child 2000 is centrally about ending war. Written in 1999, this may seem overly naive as twice in the first three months of that year, the leaders of the free world have gone to war. This does not diminish the passion with which the Hague Meeting appeals for an abolition of war and its instruments: rather it increases it – for these wars of 1999 show no sign of solving the problems they set out to address. War simply postpones a solution. Peace Child 2000, like the Hague Appeal, aims to abolish all wars – civil, environmental, political and economic. That is not a naive hope: it is probably the only way that humanity will survive intact to the end of the new millennium.
There are ways to abolish war: they take courage, they take energy and they take leadership. Those qualities lie trapped in vast quantities in the minds of young people. Peace Child provides them with a platform to display them. That’s why it has been called the “most inspiring community musical of our generation” – “an education that no parent, politician or prime minister can afford to miss!”
If you love children and have a talent to produce shows, – if you know the business of blocking, teaching kids to learn lines, set dances, sew costumes – you can change the world by doing Peace Child.
You will certainly change yourself. I know. I did.
David R. Woollcombe – December 1999