Hive Mind

In July 2010, Complicite travelled to Mumbai to run Hive Mind, a week-long workshop with 22 teachers brought together from schools across India.

A unique interdisciplinary Maths/Drama project led by actress and mathematician Victoria Gould, Hive Mind saw up to 1,000 school children create a human beehive in a spectacular ensemble performance.

Hive Mind builds on the work developed in the Maths/Drama workshops, which use drama pedagogy to explore mathematical principles and to explode the myth that maths, and learning maths, is boring.

Taking the beehive as the perfect example of a world shaped by rules and systems, Hive Mind is a five-day workshop in which participants look in-depth at the honey bee and its habits and then practically explore their learning by devising a performance based on these habits. On the final day of the workshop, the core group of participants teach their ‘bee habits’ to up to 1000 further children, who then perform their swarm in a mass performance.