In this interview Diana Damian talks to Tim Webb, Artistic Director of Oily Cart, about his company and its work for children with profound and multiple learning disabilities.

You have extensive experience creating theatre for very young children, and children with profound and multiple learning disabilities. What is your theatre making process? What do you start with, and how does it develop?

We tend to start with a concept or a method that we’ve touched on in a previous show, or come across somewhere else. It might be that we decide to concentrate on a particular sense in a new show. For example, we’re considering a show about scent/odour for a new installation piece and we’re hoping to collaborate on this with the research department of a major scent manufacturer. Our recent piece, Something in the Air, sprang from an exploration of the kinaesthetic sense. We knew that young people with complex disabilities respond well to movement in a performance and so made a piece which was fundamentally about swinging, bouncing and spinning and in which the audience were suspended in moving chairs amongst the aerial performers. On other occasions we like to take a notion like string or paper and worry it to death. Can we do a show in which everything, every sound, every costume, puppet, prop, bit of set is about paper? Sometimes it’s about finding an emotional state or a character that an audience is going to find fascinating. Then I consult with my colleagues, write a script, take it into the rehearsal room and generally watch it get taken apart. We also take care that the theatre we create is not something happening at the other end of the room that you sit and look at. We like our theatre to happen below, above, either side and behind you. We like our performances to begin long before the audience reaches the venue and to continue long after they’ve gone home. It’s 360 degree theatre.

Could you talk briefly about where the idea of Something In the Air came from?

We’ve long been aware that giving a variety of movement in a performance is important, especially for young people with complex disabilities. If you can’t see or hear or either, then the other senses, of smell, of touch, the kinaesthetic sense become that much more significant. If you’re a wheelchair user or other wise limited in movement by braces, splints and the like, again you will relish a greater range of movement, and many young people on the autism spectrum seem to get a great deal of pleasure from quite extreme movement. For years we’ve had various sorts of movable seating: rocking chairs, swing seats and the like in our shows. With the same goal in mind, we’ve done shows on trampolines and in hydrotherapy pools. I wanted to introduce a wider range of movement – with seating that would swing, bounce & spin. We began to realise that we would need a very big rig for that. From that it was a relatively short step to conclude that if we had a big rig it would be possible, and great to have aerialists up there flying with the seats, and approaching the audience from on top, underneath, at their sides, upside down and the right way up.

You collaborated with Ockham’s Razor in the devising of the show. How did the collaboration come about?

Both our companies were performing at the 2007 Manchester International Festival. We loved the Ockham’s Razor show and afterwards I went along to see if they would be interested in offering technical advice on the rig for Something in the Air. After I’d pitched my pitch they said, “Yes. we’ll do that.” It turned out they meant they wanted to perform the show, as well as devise and bring the whole thing to life. It was beyond my craziest dream. Air would have been impossible without them – oh, and also the rigger Joe White. They are all brilliant.

You also collaborate with educators and special needs professionals in your process. What form does that collaboration take in the rehearsal room?

We have educators and special needs professionals on our board and they advise on our programming. We also have very close relationships with two or three Specials School where the staff advise us and we preview parts or all of a work-in-progress. We are fortunate to be based in a South London Primary School, where there is a nursery and also a Language Unit where young people are assessed with regard to autism. We work very closely with the school and preview a great deal of our work there. During rehearsals we frequently invite teachers and the like in to advise on subjects like the use of Makaton signing, the use of hoists, or hand and foot massage.

What role do characters play in your performances, and what do you draw inspiration from? Do you use the same actors for all performances, or do you recast every time?

The characters are often defined by their silhouettes, their texture, their sound, their smell (an essential oil on a wristband can define one character from another) or a prop, which they refer to a lot (an object of reference) and which comes to define them. We don’t recast every time – there’s a wealth of experience in the team which we try hard to hold onto – but in a new piece for young people with PMLD/ASD, 50% of the cast might be new, and they pick up a good deal of what you need to know from watching the old hands in action. I think in most theatre the audience watch the characters and that’s it. In our work, whether for young people with ASD/PMLD, or babies and toddlers, it’s at least as much about the actors watching the young people, and also the adults who generally accompany the young people, to see how their performances are being received, and then nuancing what they are doing to better fit the requirements of the participant.

How do you approach the creation of your environments? Where does the material come from, the textures, smells and sounds?

We set out to create environments, ‘wonderlands’, which will engage the intended audience as completely as possible. Recently we’ve been inspired by an industrial scent laboratory (see first question), part of a wonderful garden festival at Chaumont in France; but also by an eccentric display of alternative housing at Chevotogne in Belgium; and by listening to lots of musicians. Our designer, Claire de Loon, is always on the look-out for and is an expert in sourcing the material that is just right. ‘The devil is in the detail’ is a favourite quote of hers.

You provide a lot of information to your audience before the live event itself. Could you talk a little about that, and how it affects the live event?

This varies from show to show, but basically it involves the concept of ‘The Social Story’ in our work for people with complex disabilities. Many young people with learning disabilities, and particularly those on the autism spectrum, find difficulty in encountering new social situations or meeting new people. Social Stories, widely used in Special Schools, are illustrated books which explain the patterns of society and how you might relate to them. For example, there is a Social Story about eating in public, and another about visiting a grandparent. Of course a theatre performance is a very complex social event, and our Social Stories – in the form of large-format, photo-illustrated books, or a video on DVD, or posted on our website – introduce the characters, set and story that the participants will encounter during the show. We have also used large-format illustrated books containing the story of the show in advance for mainstream nurseries. Young children often like their favourite stories told over and over again, whereas we prefer new work. By sending out the story of the show in advance we can help our young audiences see our show as the dramatisation of an old favourite. When we can afford it, this sort of process goes ‘live’ as we embed characters from a show in a school or nursery for days or even weeks before the actual performance.

What is the role that play takes in your events, and how do you use it to maintain your audience’s interest during the event?

Play is vital to the Oily Cart. Our characters interact with – or play with – the audience continually in our shows. We want the audience to feel that they are inside the game, and that they can affect the course of the game. We also use play areas, set up away from the main performance space, where arriving families or school/nursery groups can settle down, relax and play in a setting which complements the world of the show before they encounter the characters and become part of a more formal play.

What role do you believe theatre takes for your audience?

It depends on which of our several audiences we’re talking about. For example, with young people with profound and multiple learning disabilities who might have sensory impairments, unable to see or hear; or cognitive impairments, unlikely to understand concepts like cause and effect; or memory problems such that they do not remember at the end of a show what happened at the beginning (making conventional narrative inappropriate); we try to offer a great range of options and different ways into the piece. We try to be very flexible to any one participant’s requirements and offer more of what they are responding to and withdrawing those stimuli to which they are responding negatively or not at all.

Our performances are trying to open doors, to find a way of connecting with people for whom connection is difficult. We’re encouraging them to turn outwards, away from the inner worlds where it’s sometimes more comfortable to remain. We want them to communicate with us and we want to communicate with them. Sometimes with the intense focus of a performance our participants react in ways which surprise, even astonish, their families, their teachers, the people who live and work with them everyday. I love those moments, when our participants are suddenly seen in a new light, free of the ‘behaviours’ and the ’syndromes’ with which they are often labelled. Often the things that bring about this perception, for example the feel of a scented sponge on the back of the neck or gentle rocking on a trampoline is something that is easy to reproduce at home or in school. It can be repeated long after the Oily Cart has moved on to the next venue.

What relationship do you feel you have developed with your audience?

We have worked with some venues, especially some Special Schools a great deal over the years (we’ve been going for nearly 30 years) and we often find that the longer and deeper the relationship the more effective the work becomes. Of course the schools, particularly Special Schools have developed a great deal over this period and now we find ourselves working much more with young people with very complex disabilities. Many young people with lesser levels of impairment are now integrated into mainstream schools. More recently the education of very young children has become a priority, for example with the development of the Sure Start programme and Children’s Centre and this has reinforced our own interest in work for the under three’s – and as young as 6 months.

How do you feel the work that you do has changed your approach to and conception of live events as a company?

Necessity has been the mother of our invention. The sort of work that we had to develop, if we were really going to communicate with people who have sensory, or intellectual impairments, i.e. multi-sensory, highly interactive theatre, has, over the years, made us rethink our whole approach to performance. Now we try to make all of our shows address all of the senses and to allow each performance to take its own course, encouraging the intervention of the audience. I’d contend that most theatre is about the spectator perceiving the performer. Our theatre has to be about the performer perceiving the spectator/participant, and indeed any companions (family members, teachers, carers) with the participant, and then modulating the performance to engage them more fully. We need to be as live, playful and in the moment as possible, which I’d say is what all theatre should be about.

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Oily Cart is creating two new productions in 2010. Drum, by Tim Webb is an enchanting interactive, multi-sensory show for babies and toddlers aged 6 months to 2 years old. Performances at The Tramshed, London on Saturday 10th April, as part of the Greenwich Children’s Theatre Festival Tel 020 8858 7755, at the SPARK Festival Leicester from 2nd-4th June, Tel 0116 252 2455 and at Kings Place, London on Sunday 25th July, Tel 020 7520 1490.

A second production will be created for young people of primary school age, who have a Profound and Multiple Learning Disability or an Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

Both productions will tour to nurseries, Children’s Centres and Special Schools in autumn 2010 and spring 2011. To book, contact oilies@oilycart.org.uk.

What attracted you to look at Jane Austen’s female characters?

Even though Jane Austen’s first novel was published 200 years ago, her characters still speak to us through the ages. I have always adored her writing and have loved so many of the television adaptations over the years, but was really aware that we have become so involved in the romances within these novels – the relationships between Lizzy and Darcy, Emma and Mr Knightley etc, that we often overlook the voices of the women themselves. Not just the heroines, but many of the other, lesser known characters.

Was your first step then to remove them from their context and away from any male influences?

The first step was to take a piece of the text aside, see if the voices of these women could stand alone, and tell a story in its own right. I wanted to keep the monologues firmly rooted in the contexts of the stories from which they come, but allow them to breathe and speak for themselves.

What was the process of working with such strong literary characters?

Exciting! Obviously fans of Austen will always have notions of how Lizzy, or Emma, or Marianne, or Catherine should be – but I have certainly found that many members of the audience may know some Austen novels but not others (or have been brought to the theatre by their partner, without knowing any Austen at all). In these cases, it is wonderful for the uninitiated to discover Austen’s work in a new light; I have made sure that I have included some lesser known, but equally wonderful, characters (Mary Stanhope from The Three Sisters, Diana Parker from Sanditon and Elizabeth Watson from The Watsons, for example). For those that know much of Austen’s work, this should hopefully be a treat, and for those who know none of her writings, then these characters can equally stand alone and tell their stories within the play.

Why the choice to present them as monologues?

The vast majority of the pieces were already closer in form to monologues – Lizzy ranting about Darcy, Mary Stanhope deciding whether to marry, Harriet Smith confessing a secret etc. The only real difference is that the audience become the recipient of the information – the person that the character is talking to, and this brings the audience into the stories of these women.

Did you wish to maintain historical specificity? And how about the age of the different characters?

Absolutely. These women are a product of their time, and yet, human nature is such that we can still feel an affinity with them. I wanted to keep the piece firmly within in the Regency/Georgian period, and thus the set and costumes reflect this. The ages of these women range from about 17 to 40, but it is more their social situation that reveals so much about them, than their precise age. Miss Bates is probably in her late 30s, but by Regency standards, she was middle-aged and past her prime. It is therefore interesting to see someone who we would not consider to be old behaving as a middle-aged woman and seeming so much older because of it.

What also leapt out at me was actually how modern these women really are – whether it’s Mary Musgrove moaning about having to stay at home and look after the kids while her husband goes out to have a good time, or Marianne Dashwood feeling the pain of a broken heart, these are all modern tales, it’s just that the characters are 200 years old and wearing different frocks!

How did you approach weaving in text from Austen herself?

Reading, reading and re-reading! I wanted to retain the narrator in the piece and so every time I came across a wonderful piece of Austen’s narration, I made sure I would use it somewhere, to act as the glue to the story and offer a through-line in the play.

What is your personal relationship with the novelist, and ultimately, the characters?

I first came to Austen when I was fifteen, reading Emma, which I loved. I was fascinated that Austen had created a heroine who was so completely flawed, something I am still interested in, and which certainly runs through Austen’s Women.

As a performer, what was your character building process? How did you maintain fourteen separate identities? Did you feel constrained by their literary origin, or free to experiment with them theatrically?

I have been very fortunate to work with Guy Masterson, the director of the piece. As a fan of Austen and being very close to the characters, it would have been easy for me to immediately lock the characters down to what I know of them. But through his experience with solo shows and multi-character work, and his distance from Austen, he was able to help me find all of these characters within me. We have certainly made a few experimental choices, but these I think really cracked some of the characters open. All these women are women that we know in some way or another, and so finding how I blended with them was the fun part!

Do you consider your work an adaptation?

Yes, I think it is an adaptation. After an extensive period of research and reading everything Jane Austen had to offer about 4 times, I was left with about 80 pieces I could have used! So it became a process of finding the through-line, the story between these women, and discovering what other stories emerged on the way. Austen’s Women is certainly an homage to Austen, but it also tells a story in its own right about the Regency woman, and all her trials, tribulations and experiences.

Having explored Austen’s work so thoroughly, what do you feel her relationship with feminism is, and does it translate within the current feminist crisis?

Although I’m sure some would disagree, I certainly see Austen as a proto-feminist. Here was a woman who wanted to write for a living, when not only was it seriously frowned upon for a woman to write professionally, but her family were fairly ashamed of her doing so as well. In fact, her first two novels were published anonymously! And the romantic message that is prevalent in her novels – that you should really only marry for love, if you can – was a very modern way of thinking, and one that she really lived by. She, herself, made the choice not to marry someone she didn’t love, and she knew that by doing so, she was consigning herself to a life of disparaged spinsterhood. But it was a decision she was prepared to take, although she often wished that the choices available to women were greater. I think this is one of the main reasons she still resonates with current readers – I think she really was a woman ahead of her time.

Where do you think female identity lies in our current society, and what is it shaped by?

I think we are in a difficult time. Many women do not feel an affinity with previous incarnations of feminism, yet many do not want to have to retreat back into a post war idea of femininity. Women are trying to carve a way out for themselves where they can choose – where they can have successful careers, be mothers and find a level of fulfilment maybe not achieved before. But this is difficult, as I think we are still living in a very male-centric world – and may well do for many generations to come. I think the media is the real motor behind the shaping of our current society, as well as technology moving at such a pace, that we are always on the go – we have lost the art of peace. But maybe with this, and with feminism, it is being on the journey that counts – not being content with the present state of affairs, but always striving for something better.

Thank you.

Diana: How did RETURN come about?

Polarbear: RETURN has been coming for a while. I knew that I wanted to take my storytelling further and everything that I’d written before had been pieces made up of scenes, so it seemed natural to take that to the level of a full filmic experience. Working with the creative team we got together meant I could bring the story to life in a way that I never could on my own. The story is about my relationship with home and it really feels like me getting some things out that have been growing since I started performing in 2005. Plus it’s exciting to try something that hasn’t been done.

Diana: What guided the decision to perform RETURN in different spaces around the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC)?

Polarbear: Initially we wanted to perform it each night in a different space, the idea being that the carbon test of a good story (teller) is adaptability and it doesn’t matter where you are. Then as we developed design ideas and played with how it would feel, we got excited by the idea of the piece having one home and visiting other spaces. It will be interesting to see how the spaces affect each other.

Diana: What is your approach to language in your work?

Polarbear: I’m a nerd. I get obsessive over the rhythms and patterns of speech and the dynamics of description. Writing for my own voice has become what I do so the exciting thing is to know me and trust my strengths, but also to make sure that each new piece is a push in developing both my written storytelling as well as my performance. It is important for me that the difference between the everyday me and the me on stage is minimal. I don’t want to pretend to be someone else. I want to be me, taking you with me through a story. With that in mind I’m quite a ‘less is more’ person.

Diana: In your last piece, If I Cover my Nose you can’t see Me, you fused together spoken word, theatre and live visuals. How did that approach come about?

Polarbear: I never really set about to create some kind of fusion piece. I had the idea for the story, wrote it and along the way thought about the idea of it feeling like a live graphic novel and luckily found a character artist in Goonism who fit the piece perfectly. To me it’s about conveying a particular story and what makes sense rather than trying to wow with a concept.

Diana: Your work is often rhythmical and immediate. How do these elements fit into your storytelling?

Polarbear: Hopefully those elements are my storytelling. The rhythms of speech, description, dialogue and the craft of telling a good tale combined with the immediacy of the form of spoken word. Me on stage telling you a story right now. That’s why it’s exciting. Sink or swim. Hopefully I can swim.

Diana: Hybridity is a major aspect in your work, fusing poetry with rap, and sonnets with every day language. Do you fuse different elements depending on the story you work on?

Polarbear: To be honest I never think about it. I have an idea and it becomes clear early on what I imagine the particular piece will feel like. The elements of where I’m from and my creative background just leak through I guess. Everything must serve the story and everything is a definite choice. Nothing I share is undecided.

Diana: Can you talk about your process?

Polarbear: My work revolves around me. Where I am, what I’m finding important, things I’m realising and also things I remember. A certain idea rises to the top and becomes all I can think about. From there it becomes all about characters. Bits of me, bits of people I know well, bits I create. Those characters in the situation I have been thinking about myself in, I put the characters in the situation I’ve been thinking about myself in, and go from there. Ever since If I cover my nose I have been thorough with back-story. Every character gets fully fleshed out until they’re real. Then I set about writing scenes. Sometimes things come out in an order, other times it’s more random and all the time I write about 10 times as much as finally gets in to the piece. Throughout the writing process I am speaking the words and allowing the feel of their delivery to influence the writing.

Diana: And where does staging come in?

Polarbear: For RETURN I worked very closely with Yael Shavit the director and script developer. I would be writing small chunks and sharing them with her and we kind of built the story together. The staging comes when the words are edited down to the least amount possible to say what we want to say and I have them in me enough to play with their delivery. Then we start to play and the writing is always affected by what we do.

Diana: You’ve travelled a lot with you work. Does audience reception and intimacy change from place to place?

Polarbear: In essence it’s the same. You can feel when you have people with you, really listening and I’ve been lucky enough to have that feeling wherever I’ve gone. There are some people who maybe view my work as overly simple and possible a little blunt, and as a result connect less with it, but in terms of intimacy it’s basically a slice of me and my personality so if you think I’m alright we’re fine and if you don’t then you’ll probably start thinking about what’s for dinner.

Diana: What freedom do you think your medium offers you?

Polarbear: I can say what I want and if it’s honest then real people will respond. I think spoken word is a funny one really because some people seem to forget that that’s all it is and anything about the performance has to be on top of that foundation – in my opinion of course.

Diana: What is the distinction between theatre and spoken word for you?

Polarbear: I don’t know really. I want to tell stories, just like most forms of performance. I write for me to speak. If it’s performed in a theatre is that theatre? If it’s upstairs in a pub is that spoken word? I don’t mind. It doesn’t change what I do. It just means sometimes people have to spend more to see me do it.

Diana: What’s the most challenging element of your work?

Polarbear: Not so long ago I would have said remembering why I do it, but that’s not a problem now. RETURN has been a real maturation for me in every sense and as lame as it sounds the only challenging thing is me doing the story justice every single time I perform it.

Diana: Future work?

Polarbear: I know what’s next story-wise and it’s a big’un. I’m a big believer in talking about stuff when it exists, but I do know it will be called sTaTe and will be unlike anything I’ve done before. I’m excited by the idea of writing for other people too. I wrote a play for 5 MCs with Birmingham REP last year and enjoyed the process. I’ll be doing more of that kind of thing from now on I think.

Diana: Career highlight?

Polarbear: This piece RETURN without question. I’ve been lucky enough to get opportunities to realise the ideas that I’d been stocking up for years and so each new thing feels like a stepping stone that I sometimes look back at and always smile about. The fact that I get to have an idea and make something out of nothing and work with talented people who share my love for stories is an ongoing highlight. I sound proper lovey don’t I? Yuk.

Diana: Thank you!

The company’s ten-year story has not been without difficulty or probing from its critics, but as Shunt prepares to leave behind the much-loved Vaults, closing the door on that Carrollian hole at London Bridge station, I caught up with artist, academic and Shunt lighting designer, Mischa Twitchin, to take stock of Shunt’s achievements, to talk Money, and to ask what the future may hold.

Interview contents / Quick Reference 

Please note: in editing the interview transcript and dividing it up into ‘bite-size’ sections, I made several alterations to the chronological order of the original discussion. Any incongruencies in the text are therefore my doing. All photographs used in this article belong to Shunt and must not be reused without prior permission.

1. Origins     (↑ top)

(Two SHUNT Cabaret flyers from September 1999)

Andrew: How did Shunt begin?

Mischa: Shunt is a collective of ten artists – we met on a one-year postgraduate course at Central School of Speech and Drama ten years ago. That course then was about fostering companies. You worked in different groups throughout the year and then the last term was given over for each company to make a show. The task we set ourselves was to explore medieval representations of torture. On the whole, the company for that project was self-selecting and before the course was over we had agreed to rent a space to continue working together. So, being a member of Shunt in the first few years meant paying £50 a month cash to rent a railway arch in Bethnal Green!

We made The Ballad of Bobby Francois there and Dance Bear Dance, and we also did bi-monthly cabarets. Dance Bear Dance came at the end of a five-year period by which time we’d taken over the arch next door and the performance explored the relation between these two, parallel spaces. As it turned out, it had some big theatrical coups in it. It also happened to coincide with the change of Artistic Director at the National Theatre (NT). Part of Nicholas Hytner’s new strategy was to open up what counted as “theatre” for his audience at the NT.

Several people from the NT saw that show, including then Nick Starr and Nick Hytner. After five years, we were looking to move – having exhausted the arch spaces – and they invited us to do something in one of the non-theatre spaces on the Southbank. We thought what could we possibly do there? But all credit to them, they acknowledged that, and when we found this space [Shunt Vaults] Nick Starr hosted the negotiations with Railtrack in his office. It took about a year to get into this space. They also supported us with a couple of fundraising evenings – obviously, we had no money – and, then, crucially the tickets for our first show here, Tropicana, were sold through their box office, so there could be credit card bookings in advance.

However, that also meant, in contrast to our experience in Bethnal Green, that we opened the show with 200 people outside – which rather pre-empted our usual practice of working on the show with an audience in previews. We had this whole choreographed beginning, for example, and it was obvious on the first night that it wasn’t going to work. It took a couple of months of really learning what it meant to have an audience in this space for that show to come to fruition.

The tie-in with the NT also meant we were committed to a press night, which we’d never had before. So, there was one evening with a raft of critics who’d never seen any of our previous work and had no particular interest in our way of working. Indeed, why should they? They were waiting for the show to start, with no real sense that they might already be part of it when they came in. So, the main press record is not so good for Tropicana – but then it ran for nine months! In a way, that scenario had changed a bit by the time of Amato Saltone, and it helped open the door for work off-site associated with the NT.

2. Money     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Money)

Andrew: Shunt is launching a new show in September 2009 in a new space close to the Shunt Lounge at London Bridge. It’s your first show since Amato Saltone in 2006. What’s the basic premise behind Money?

Mischa: Conversations started over a year ago about what might be the material or the starting point for a new show. We have used a common text source – not necessarily literary – as a point of departure before. With The Ballad of Bobby Francois, our first show, it was a book called Alive; and then the handbook of rules for lawn tennis for The Tennis Show; or for Dance Bear Dance there was material around the Gun Powder Plot. It’s about coming to an agreement around a shared source that’s accessible through that reading. That’s not to say that the book is the source of the work; it’s just one element together with the people and the space. Then the key question will always be what is the journey of the audience that we’re constructing with these elements?

The conversations started before Easter last year, so before Northern Rock, but after the Enron scandal. One topic in discussion was the hubris of the financial world. Then for other reasons too, we were reading various novels by Émile Zola.

Andrew: Why Zola?

Mischa: One strand of conversation at a certain point was “why not take a novel?” Thérèse Raquin seems to be used every other year! So, there was a sort of curiosity about that. Then, of course, any individual Zola novel is part of a bigger cycle, so different people were reading different books to comment on in meetings.

Andrew: Were any of these books connected to the company’s prior discussion of the global financial situation?

Mischa: Well, as the crisis unfolded then people were reading about it. A couple of us had already read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, for instance. There were other books too. Lizzie [Lizzie Clachan] brought in a book from around the 1880s I think, a sort of an encyclopedia of the future, illustrating the technology of one hundred years’ later (so, in our time) as imagined by people in 1880. Then, I think, David [David Rosenberg] came across Zola’s novel Money (L’Argent), which has in its background Zola’s diagnosis of the corruption of the Second Empire. This, of course, chimed with our own times. Indeed, it’s interesting that the preface to the English translation, which was made around 1900, references specific financial events at that time, suggesting to readers how interesting it would be for them to read Zola’s account of similar events forty years earlier. So, you don’t need to be a Marxist necessarily to recognize cyclical, structural crises within capitalism.

We kind of settled on Money as a common source in a similar way that we had settled on the works of Cornell Woolrich for Amato Saltone. And also there’s a slight theme from Zola’s La Bête Humaine, with the image of a train that’s out of control.

3. Space     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event The Tennis Show)

Andrew: Money is being performed in a new space, an old tobacco warehouse not far from the Shunt Vaults. I’m interested in the relationship, if there is one, between the genesis of Money and the new space; whether there’s any element of site-specificity to it, and whether artistically the space has been a source of renewal for Shunt as a company.

Mischa: We’ve been in two spaces over the past ten years: Arch 12a in Bethnal Green and the Shunt Vaults, here at London Bridge. Essentially the company has always been committed to having a space of its own.

To the degree that it’s possible, then, we have control over access to it. Like the company name, ‘Shunt’, the space doesn’t already say “theatre”. It means that the invitation to an audience can be part of the work, part of the dramaturgy, part of the scenography. The actual entrance to the space can be materially reinvented for any particular show.

One of the things that the ten members of the Collective could agree on artistically was that, even if any individual had an interest in working in theatres, there was a shared commitment to working in our own space. For the public – distinct from the critics, perhaps – the work needn’t then be prejudged in terms of “a night out at the theatre”.

Of course, there will always be those associations, particularly for Tropicana because it was marketed through the NT. But, nevertheless, having our own space meant that it was possible to build a whole journey for an audience coming out of the tube station. The first quarter of the space of that show was wholly constructed, complete with a lift! So, in that sense it’s not site-specific – we make a fictional world for the audience. In the case of Money, we’ve built a vast machine.

So, there’s a relation to a space that has atmosphere, but which is, in a sense, neutral in theatrical terms – such as a railway arch. It can be more or less atmospheric, which already gives you something, but we’re not making a show about railway arches. We’ve not made a show at the Vaults about the construction of the railway in London. We’ve made fictional worlds for an audience that nevertheless are, of course, informed by, and produced in relation to, the space that we are in.

We’ve been at the Vaults for over five years and obviously at some point we will have to leave here. We’ve had three stays of execution and we’re here now until November [2009]. The idea was to set up the new show in its own space, and there was this warehouse just round the corner. It’s an empty shell, totally uninteresting as a building, but now there’s an extraordinary machine inside it. It’s great when people ask what it used to be before!

4. The Gaze     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Amato Saltone)

Andrew: I’d like to talk about the ‘gaze’ as a leitmotif in Shunt’s work.

Mischa: I suppose that was largely thematized in Amato Saltone.

Andrew: Yes, in Amato Saltone, but also in The Tennis Show, where you have that wonderful moment between female and male audiences who see each other on two sides of a tennis court, after having spent most of the performance in gender separation.

Mischa: Yes, in the Bargehouse. There were two points of access to the space, which already suggested the possibility of separating the audience. Then there were the rules of lawn tennis. Many games have this separation between men and women. So, you had this play with the men’s game and the women’s game. The same sort of social structure exists in dancing. So, the idea of the point of meeting was to have the two audiences facing each other across the tennis court, and once the lines of the court had all disappeared – down a hole that was there in the floor! – we had this voice-over invitation, using everyone’s names thanks to the tickets, with some schmaltzy music: “Would x like to dance with y?” Although it only actually happened once, I think.

With Amato Saltone, it was one of the initial ideas: trying to construct a scene in which the same thing could be seen by two different audiences. That was the initial idea and then the Cornell Woolrich theme was something that emerged out of other strands of our reading. As it happens, he is the author of Rear Window, which follows precisely this structure. Besides that, there is also an interest amongst most people within the company to have at least some moment in which there’s a common experience for the whole audience to share the image of something together.

Another key visual moment was in Dance Bear Dance, this point where the parallel audiences were revealed to each other. It was interesting the way in which audiences went through the process of asking whether it was a mirror or another set of performers, before acknowledging that they were part of a show that included them, in this image of the other audience. That was quite a theatrical coup, as it turned out.

5. Audience Participation     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Dance Bear Dance)

Andrew: In terms of the two productions at Shunt Vaults, Tropicana and Amato Saltone, I’m curious about the extent of ‘freedom’ that you give the audience to roam, search and explore the space. Sometimes there is a given set of parameters whereby in Amato Saltone, for example, the audience was given names, keys and a party invitation message; or more loosely in the case of Tropicana, where upon exiting the lift you were able to explore the space before a narrative sequence unfolded in the operating theatre and encroached on that sense of liberty. From my perspective as an audience member, the effect this sense of freedom has is one of participation, of straddling the line between actor and spectator, and that’s exciting and exhilarating. However, more often than not in Shunt’s work, I find that sense of freedom gives way, as the shows evolve, to a more traditional, proscenium-type configuration in which the lines are more clearly defined. Could you talk about the notions of freedom and participation?

Mischa: I suspect that this “freedom” is rather spurious. It’s the way you describe the experience, but the part of the experience that you’re calling “freedom” is no less conventionalized and constructed than the part of the experience that you’re calling traditional. There are a whole set of accidents that compose these possibilities as well as the decisions, of course; but, as I said before, one of the main interests of the company is to consider the journey of the audience. The work includes “an audience”, distinct from a group of people wandering randomly. How they are included is our responsibility; we are making an experience for an audience, in an environment that we are constructing. It’s not a Happening, it’s a rehearsed show and even if it’s not apparent to anybody – even ourselves sometimes! – there is a narrative structure.

The audience doesn’t have “a role” other than that of being an audience. There’s absolutely no role-play – the audience is not invited to perform.

Andrew: Even when a telephone rings and doesn’t stop until an audience member plucks up the courage to answer it?

Mischa: It’s a contrivance. There are moments in which there’s the invitation to the audience to act in the situation, but the production isn’t putting the responsibility of the performance onto anybody doing it. But it makes a difference, of course – and that’s the fun of it. It’s exciting and interesting to keep open the sense of possibility in the present moment, but the key thing is to keep open the sense that something can be imagined, which doesn’t mean you’re going to have to do it or take on a role.

So, what is the place of an audience? How to make coming to see a particular show already part of the experience of that show? With Amato Saltone, the first week it was people coming into a surprise birthday party, but that wasn’t going anywhere; so, by the end of the first month it was people going into a swingers party, in which we were giving people the fiction of an identity, with a name and a key. Curiously, that was something that appealed to a lot of people, but all it actually meant was that you had a secret name. You didn’t have to do anything, but it made your imaginary relation to being in that environment more active. After all, it was an environment that consisted of the other people that you were with. In that sense, it wasn’t a case of: “I’m watching a swingers party over there on stage, which they’re representing for me”; rather, “I understand that I am part of a swingers party, although I know that I’m not – but that is the story of what I’m doing here, and so where’s that going to take me?”

6. The Collective     (↑ top)

(The 10 members of the SHUNT Collective)

Andrew: What is the organizational basis of the Shunt Collective?

Mischa: There’s no need for rose-tinted glasses, sometimes it’s fraught and difficult, but there’s an ethos. With the last two shows and, of course, the Lounge, a team of people has gravitated to the space – some really fantastic souls. There is a wider sense of individual work that is equally part of a larger project.

That spirit of collaboration is something special; it’s about the quality of the particular person, not simply their extraordinary skills, but their own ethos. Professionalism is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. You can’t institutionalize individuals’ sense of commitment to their own work within a situation like that.

7. Cabarets     (↑ top)

(Flyer for a SHUNT Cabaret event)

Andrew: Could you talk about the significance of Shunt cabarets in the development of the company’s work and how they fed into the creation of the Shunt Lounge?

Mischa: We did two big shows in our Bethnal Green space: The Ballad of Bobby Francois and Dance Bear Dance and we also had a bi-monthly cabaret – on a Sunday. The only condition for performing in the cabaret was that nothing could last more than ten minutes, but otherwise you could do anything you liked.

It was important in the sense that you were participating in collective projects, which were things you wouldn’t necessarily have envisaged by yourself – with the excitement of realizing something that you couldn’t do or imagine by yourself, as the creative possibility of the group. And connected to that, the cabarets provided us with the circumstance in which people could individually show to other members of the company the different kinds of work that they wanted to experiment with. I think that’s important.

With Dance Bear Dance, we did a week of cabarets trying out ideas; a series of individual responses to a particular theme that fed into the production. And certainly, individual shows have developed from things that people have tried out in various forms in cabarets for themselves.

The Lounge was in some ways a continuation of this. It is a space in which people can come in and experiment with something. It’s been a unique thing in the London theatre scene.

8. Shunt Lounge     (↑ top)

(A short musical documentary by Susanne Dietz about the Shunt Lounge)

Andrew: To what extent, both artistically and commercially, has the Lounge Project been a success?

Mischa: The Lounge has been a huge success. It has been going for three years and the number of artists who have been able to experience for themselves what their idea could be in relation to an audience is remarkable. The key thing is that we provide the space, the technical support and a diverse audience coming in and experiencing the work. If you perform here it needn’t be to a coterie audience or just your friends.

There are over 2000 people a week in here – so, in relation to other things the Arts Council support it’s an extraordinary benefit, particularly when considering the phenomenal level of work produced, consistently, forty-eight weeks a year.

It’s spectacular here every week, but not necessarily a spectacle. It’s not advertised, there are no reviews, you pay to come into the space – a fiver on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and a tenner on Fridays and Saturdays – and then you have access to everything for free. So, whether it’s Stationhouse Opera trying something out, or an opportunity to tattoo bananas, there’s no prior judgment. That’s important where artists are experimenting with an idea. Their work is part of a whole evening that includes a lot of other work, installations, maybe a band, the bar, and so on. Each week – or fortnight – is curated by a different Shunt artist, supported by Andrea [Andrea Salazar] and her team, and it will be different in its dynamic, depending on all the work that’s being shown then.

9. Working Process     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Sightings)

Andrew: In the case of the collective, you don’t take on hierarchical roles so how do you actually go about creating a piece? What’s the Shunt working process, particularly given that your productions seem to be in continual evolution?

Mischa: The work is always in development with the audience. There are always company members watching the show, and then for the performers, as often as not, proximity to the audience is like ours in this interview now. If any particular moment is rubbish, you know it. Why would you want to do it again tomorrow? Of course, there are periods at which it’s exhausting and it takes a lot more effort to initiate bigger changes. But with Amato Saltone, for example, we changed the end in the last week of the run.

So, once there’s a sort of agreement on a common topic, there are basically a lot of improvisations and then proposals for other exercises, games, other things to explore, get sedimented out those. People also have responsibilities then in order to realise the structure of a production. So, there is a director, there is a designer, there is a lighting designer, a sound designer, and there are performers. But the work is a collective realisation. It’s not that any one of those roles has simply instrumentalized the others to realize a particular artistic vision that could otherwise have been achieved by just employing other people to do the work. What has been produced is the work of this particular group of people – both the Shunt members and our collaborators, the Shunt Associate Artists. In a sense, even if for any one person, they don’t feel they particularly “own” very much of it, it’s owned by the collective.

The tag line of “designed, directed and performed by Shunt” doesn’t necessarily refer to just the ten of us, it includes other associate artists like Nigel [Nigel Barrett], Tom [Tom Lyall] and Simon [Simon Kane], or people who have regularly worked with us like Steve [Steve Royle] with the lighting and George [George Tomlinson] with the whole scenic production – people who are also part of creating the work. So, there’s Shunt in so far as it’s the name of the collective of ten people, and then it’s the name of the event, which involves a much larger group of people.

10. Archives & Documentation     (↑ top)

(Image taken from the SHUNT website archives)

Andrew: You mentioned earlier the idea of documenting the Lounge. If that project were to go ahead, whom would the documentation be for and what form would it take?

Mischa: There are various bits of documentation. There are two films on Youtube, with links from the website, one by Inigo [Inigo Alcaniz], who has taken photographs at the Lounge for a long time, and the other by Susa [Susanne Dietz], a video artist who is one of the Shunt “family”. She has done the video work in all the shows and also has an archive of material that goes back to the early cabarets in Bethnal Green. I think she has plans to work with that material.

The problem with a lot of the shows is that they were lit for the eyes, in the actual space – not as a picture to be looked at separately. So, there’s a lot that is too dark for the camera. For me, lighting is about the contrast between light and dark. In “professional theatre”, there’ll be a photo shoot for the press and nobody could care less. It’s just a case of “put all the lights on”, and that’s fine, of course, because it’s just some random press photo. Also, with most of our shows there hasn’t necessarily been one point of view. What would it be to film a show like Tropicana? There’s the autopsy scene, of course, but apart from that it would be fairly difficult, since the first half of the show was about the spatial distribution of the audience – in darkness! Nonetheless, there is video material, but there isn’t really any narrative documentation.

I am interested to gather stories though – I’ve set up a little postcard link on the website with Nahum [Nahum Mantra], to try to elicit testimony as to what the Lounge means to people – anecdotes, memories, things that will otherwise be unrecorded but which concern the real experience of being here. Not just for the audience but also for the amazing people working here and their contribution each week.

So, who would it be for? Well, in the first instance it would be a sort of present for all those people, to be able to say retrospectively: “Oh, that’s what I was doing!” But it would also be an historical testimony.

Like the Lounge itself, perhaps the documentation could encourage and support the development of confidence for somebody to explore ideas and a practice in relation to an audience – if that’s what they’re concerned with. Wouldn’t that be great?!

11. The Future     (↑ top)

Andrew: What direction will the company take over the next five years?

Mischa: There’ll be the new show in September and then by sometime early next year – we trust – there’ll be a new space for the Lounge. Those two things mark a big change for the company.

Andrew: Why do you have to leave the Shunt Vaults?

Mischa: Because London Bridge station is being redeveloped. There are issues to do with access and the structure of the viaduct. I don’t know what the long term plans are for this space, but it’s part of the development of the station. But even if this space becomes sanitized and turned into a series of Starbucks, there will be a number of people who pass through to the station and think: “Oh, isn’t this the place where I saw people snogging dogs?”; “Isn’t this the place where there were two people sitting in hoops for six hours?”; “Isn’t this the place that had that strange concertina box that extended the whole length of it?”

The point is there’s the company with the wider group and its organization. Before moving here, the company was essentially the ten members. Since being here the company has grown as an organization. There needs to be another way in which the collective can develop with the shows and the Lounge – something new needs to be explored in relation to all of that experience. Let’s just hope that in another five years’ time we will still have an audience!

Mika Eglinton: You performed Resurrection in Bradford earlier this year and you’ve just opened Visions at the Barbican in London, both pieces are part of a trilogy of works called They Only Come at Night, could you talk a bit about where the idea came from?

Alan Lane: It started a long time ago. We all live quite close to each other in Leeds and there’s a petrol station round the corner from us where a man was beaten to death one night. It was a horrible and disturbing incident, but by the end of the week the local papers and people had come up with different ideas as to why it had happened. No one knew the truth, but everyone was willing to speculate. Some people were saying the man was definitely from Eastern Europe, and others were saying he was into drugs, but what became increasingly clear was that people were happier with the idea that this was just a piece of mindless violence, a horrible accident. It was quite strange that a community presented with something so horrific should start to create myths – stories based on very little truth.

Then a few years ago we spent some time in the Balkans, in Bosnia. A woman was telling me one day that after some of the massacres, in which all the older men had been removed, they would tell their younger children that vampires had come for their fathers, because it was easier to believe that vampires had killed your dad than it was to believe that the man down the road had done it.

We started to think about vampire myths and how we tell stories to shield ourselves but also as a means of understanding the extremes of life without having to be horrified by our fellow man. The world is a mad place at the minute, so we thought the most comfortable way for us to talk about it was to make up a massive, new vampire myth with different rules so that we could have a look at the world, because it’s a bit too scary to look at head on.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Could you talk about why you’re interested in subjects that are often related to traumatic histories or memories?

Alan: It’s to do with how we turn our own personal histories into a set of stories, and then we turn our collective history into a set of stories too, so to an extent we’re defined by and made up of stories. We tend to look at what we call the ‘macro myth’ in traumatic events; so for example what is the place of Dresden or Srebrenica in a shared national history and how does that end up filtering down and affecting a single person? It’s to do with how ideas at the level of nation, culture or community affect the individual in that tiny moment when it’s just a man and woman having a cup of coffee. All that pressure of history that we feel all the time but we ignore, sometimes it just explodes into a personal story and that’s really fascinating to us.

Mika: Did this interest begin when you were still students at Sheffield?

Alan: Yes it did. The company is made up of 8 people and 5 of us were at the University of Sheffield together ten years ago. We developed an interest in how theatre could reflect the pace and style at which we live our lives, how we read information, how computer screens are used and so on. That’s grown over ten years into creating immersive environments.

Mika: What do you mean by an immersive environment?

Alan: It’s where we put the audience into the middle of a film, except that it’s real, it’s 3D, you can touch it, and if there’s water you’ll get wet, because water is wet. It’s where you can look behind you, in front of you, above you and below you and there will be the world we create, and the world might only be 6” x 6”, or it could be the whole building, but until you actually decide to leave the world it will completely surround you. It will smell like we want it to smell and it will feel like we want it to feel. So it is a lot like being in a film that we’ve made for you; you’re the hero in your own film, but you just don’t have to do anything.

Mika: How much ‘free will’ does the audience have or in what way, if at all, do you control the environment?

Alan: We try and make the audience feel like they’ve got total free will and then we try and make sure they go where we want them to go. So in Resurrection for example, the audience can walk anywhere they like in a huge studio space, but they can’t leave the room. In the Barbican car park, they have to follow a path and if they leave that path then the show will stop working, because they won’t be where we want them to be; but hopefully when we take you around, it feels like you’re in complete control of your own experience. In reality of course, it’s a piece of theatre, it’s rehearsed and it’s timed. So I think that’s always a big challenge for us to try and constantly make the audience feel like they’re in control, but also for the show to feel like it’s got a discipline to it.

Mika: Moving on to methodologies, as a creative ensemble I know you spend a lot of time conducting research as well as actually building the piece, could you explain the basic creation process for one of your shows?

Alan: It always makes us laugh, because at the minute we’re working with the University of Huddersfield and the University of Salford, and we often get emails from students asking us to describe our process to which we always answer: “we come up with an idea and we sit round a table until the idea is much better than it was”. And on the one hand that’s a very flippant answer, but actually it’s quite truthful. We’re not made up of performers. There are performers in our company, but a lot of us aren’t and so as a result we tend to have quite a passive process in the sense that we don’t improvise, we don’t rehearse in that way like other companies do.

What we do is we sit down and we build the show in concept. We don’t just come up with the idea, we think exactly how much it’s going to cost to make it, how long it will take and so on. In other words we work through what would normally be called the creative process and the production process, and we keep fine honing it and asking questions of each other and that can take weeks. So we can be sat round that table for a month, and then finally when we’re ready to make something that’s worth making, we start making it.

It’s a very discursive process and it’s one in which the composer could come up with an idea for the script, and the novelist could come up with the idea for the video, we are all equals round the table, it’s just that we have specialities, but it’s basically a meeting of people with ideas and we don’t leave the table until the idea meets everybody’s satisfaction.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: I’m sure you’re aware of other companies that are working with disused or non-purpose built performance spaces such as Shunt or Punchdrunk for example, where do you see Slung Low in the UK theatre landscape today?

Alan: I think we’re clearly part of a recent interest and enthusiasm for installations, of being put in immersive environments, but we’re also from a very traditional theatre background in the sense that we start and end with a story and everything we do, no matter how experimental it is, is to try and push the story into being clearer and more compelling. It’s vital to us that the story is clear to our audience and that we are taking them on a journey that is both a literal journey, we’re moving through a space, but also an emotional one like theatre has always been. I hope that we sit in both camps, or we take our inspiration from both camps.

Mika: Where do you think this renewed interest in ‘installations’, as you put it, comes from?

Alan: Firstly, companies have been working with installations for a long time and it’s just that we tend to forget about those people and hone in on a new person, and that’s fine, that’s the way the world works, but I think it’s also to do with the way our world is changing. You know, I have an iPhone and that phone is my bespoke phone, it makes me feel special, I go onto Amazon and there is a shopping list made just for me. You have a choice in everything now, you can go into the coffee shop and ask for your coffee to be made exactly the way you want it, and that’s something that in the last 10 – 15 years has become increasingly important; that the world is set up to deal with us en masse, but as a group of individuals.

So it’s constantly about something that makes us feel unique and bespoke and that’s what this type of work does. You go into an installation and you might be with 200 other people, but you feel like you’re the only person who had the experience you had that night, that it was special, and that in some way you chose that experience for yourself, even though obviously it’s a collective experience, shared by many others. If you can find a way to make a show so that it’s a shared experience in which everyone feels they’re unique, then I think that’s a very contemporary way of looking at the world and I think that’s why this sort of work is so popular at the minute.

Mika: So in that case is it possible to say that the trend is to a large extent influenced by technological developments?

Alan: Absolutely, if you walk into a train station now, you’re listening to your iPod, you’re reading the headlines on the BBC big screen, you’re checking which platform your train is, you’re checking your emails, your Facebook page, you’re taking in information so quickly, much faster than our parents generation did, much faster than even we did 20 years ago. Just look at the way television is edited, the scenes are shorter, the snaps between each scene more abrupt and on the bottom will be some scrolling information that you’re also taking in.

So in a similar sense the immersive installation allows us to transmit information to the audience through a number of different ways: it could be through a live performer, or you could have a soundtrack, it could be through smell, you could be watching a screen at the same time, you could be reading something while someone talks to you, all of this is possible, and I think that’s absolutely the influence of technology. Our brains are soaking up information much faster than they used to be because technology has trained us to do it.

Mika: What are the company’s artistic influences?

Alan: I think the thing that influences us is just people who tell stories incredibly well, and so the last show that we all saw as a company was Robert Lepage’s Lip Sync. We don’t aspire to make work in the same way that Mr. Lepage does, but just watching someone who is that good at telling stories is inspiring. When you attempt to push form and content and try to innovate as a company, you have to be careful about inspiration, because otherwise you just end up being a version of someone else. So we tend to be inspired by great storytellers across genres rather than necessarily having a theatre company that we follow and adore.

Mika: What is Slung Low’s relationship with text?

Alan: In They Only Come at Night, we came up with an idea for a show and then we turned that idea into a graphic novel, a comic book, and then we took that comic book and we adapted it for the stage. In that sense there’s no play script, but we all have a copy of this picture book that we follow, and we work out what we’re going to say, how we’re going to act and what we’re going to make accordingly. So our first focus and priority is the story, not necessarily a play script or even a text, because we might not have one, but we would all have some form of artefact. With Helium last year at the Barbican, it was based on a short story and this year it’s a graphic novel, but we did a show earlier in the year that was a script, it was a text in a traditional sense, but it could also be a video or even a song.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Is there any sort of preference among types of technology you use in production?

Alan: We’ve just don’t a show that was all based online, an alternative reality game called TOCAN Live and it had no sound or moving pictures. In other shows we use a lot of video and orchestrated sound. So in a sense the media we tend to use is not film but the components that are used in film. In Visions we’re using a very cinematic soundtrack and video in an atmospheric way, so we also try to make sure that we go across media.

Mika: Does part of your work have a documentary element to it?

Alan: I think although our work is always based on some thought about the real world, like the Bosnia story I told you about or the incident at the petrol station, actually what we’re creating are massive immersive metaphors in a sense.

Mika: What is the company’s artistic policy?

Alan: The artistic policy is firstly that it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from, it just matters that it’s a good idea. So even as the ‘boss’, if I come with an idea and everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish. That’s very important, because otherwise it can be very ego driven for us. And the other one is that we will learn whatever we have to learn in order to accomplish what it is we want to do. So we edit all our own video, we make all our own music, but when we started we didn’t know how to do any of that. So if we need to know how to do animation, which is something that we’ve had to do for one of our projects, then one of us goes away and sits in a room until he/she knows how to do it.

Mika: Some of the company members teach at universities. How does teaching and creating theatre fit together?

Alan: Well one of the most important, pragmatic things for us is that we have to make a living, and this year we’re creating 4 large-scale shows which is incredibly tiring, so teaching is a different type of challenge. The other thing is that we make much bigger shows than our resources perhaps allow us to, and working with students means that we can let them into our genuine process. So we don’t go in and teach conceptual work, we go in and say “right in 6 months we have to make this show and we’re going to spend the next month making it with you”. We then break it up into little bits and get to work. So in that way, the student are learning new skills as they work on the show with us.

It also means that in terms of research and development and in throwing ideas around, all of a sudden we now have many more minds throwing the idea around, and that’s a really exciting artistic feat for us. So I think we’ve found a way to both teach and make work and the two aren’t in any way exclusive of each other, they are integral to how we make work. In a really practical sense we often need an awful lot of bodies and the students have been brilliant over the last 5 years in helping with that process.

Mika: The last question is what’s on the horizon in terms of projects over the next 5 years for Slung Low?

Alan: Well, hopefully within the next 6 to 12 months, we’ll find a residence, a premises. We want to take over a warehouse and turn it into our studio. The other thing is that we’re looking to collaborate abroad. We’ve spent the last 10 years working in this country, and hopefully through our recent British Council showcase in Edinburgh and with this show at the Barbican, along with all the things we’re doing this year, we’ll have the chance to work with artists from abroad.

Conceived and created by Whit MacLaughlin and his award winning Philadelphia-based company, New Paradise Laboratories, Fatebook is a meditation on fate or destiny as seen through the lens of digital communication. The online strand of the project was launched in July this year and follows the lives of 13 characters as they interact with audience members across multiple social media networks. Their stories evolve – with directorial input from MacLaughlin – through a new media narrative of Twitter and Facebook updates, YouTube videos and photos on Flickr; documenting scenes from their everyday lives in Philadelphia.

Each of these 13 online odysseys is heading for offline collision at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in September later this summer. The real space performance is set to bring even more digitalia to bear. A myriad of screens, projectors and live video feeds will transform the space into an epic mediatised environment in which the borders between digital and analogue, live and recorded, fact and fiction merge in a “momentous night—the Fatebook party—where time stops, computers crash…and nobody can say what’s real.”

After an in-depth Skype exchange with MacLaughlin it became clear that here was an experiment at the bleeding edge of digital performance, evolving in sync with developments in social media. I wanted to find out more about the artistic and logistical challenges involved in creating performance online, to extend my ongoing exploration of performance work crossing the digital-analogue divide and to take stock (in a performative context) of terms in frequent but awkward circulation on the Web. Terms such as real (real time, real space, real life), physical (physical space, physical world), space (cyberspace, real space), and the fact/fiction binary.

Andrew Eglinton: Where did the idea for Fatebook originate from?

Whit MacLaughlin: Around two years ago I was observing the effect of social media on young people. There seemed to be an encroaching difference in the way the imagination worked in this space. I was also hoping to participate in the front line of experiential investigations into the way ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’ interact in the imagination. What is the nature of the interactions we experience in both spaces? Where does this experience reside in the individual? I became interested in devising a piece that made use of the style or nature of the experience in both media.

I also watched people having sex in a public online space and was interested in how sexual function was stimulated by almost pure, prefrontal, ‘real time’ stimulation, as opposed to the long-standing tradition of literary pornography.

Around about the same time, I saw a performance of a ‘movie’ at the Ars Electronica conference in Linz, Austria. The piece wasn’t terribly interesting, but one great moment happened that set off an alarm in me; the piece was broadcast through a variety of media, but one of the actors suddenly walked through the space we were inhabiting, and I was struck by the way that I responded so differently to the actor in cyber expressions as opposed to real expressions. I liked the smash up and that was the genesis of Fatebook.

I felt that many of the online films and ’shows’ had not really translated the medium away from film and TV into the new zone. They still seemed cinematic. So I was interested in investigating the possibility of narrative that was interactive; both inside the medium, and then across platforms, so to speak.

Andrew: You mention a perceived difference in the way the imagination works in online spaces, what sort of difference(s)? Have you been able to pinpoint anything in particular?

Whit: Well, it’s conjecture and unscientific at this point, but I was struck by how powerful and immediate text scrolling across a computer screen could be. I began to think about teenagers and how ‘personal’ their conversations are in texting and IMing. I felt that the overall tenor of online ‘conversation’ was really close to the atmosphere of pillow talk. Whispering into someone else’s ear. Short phrases. Immediate and almost telepathic. Not couched in metaphor. Not carefully articulated. Even with young adults, it was bedroom to bedroom.

Andrew: I want to pick up on your experience of watching people having sex in a public online space and interacting with viewers via text chat. What aspect(s) or characteristic(s) of that real time environment did you find stimulating?

Whit: It was the sense of something unfolding in the ‘present’ that was an exhibitionistic expression of intimacy. There were also no physical inhibitions, and this is linked to the phenomenon of physical safety and emotional vulnerability in cyberspace. It’s a paradigm that I find very interesting. Young people are especially vulnerable to emotional cruelty online. Not being wary of it and not understanding the intense ‘publicness’ of action in cyberspace.

Andrew: So these fragments, these influences and ideas formed the basis for a devised performance project. What was the first practical step towards realising Fatebook and when did it take place?

Whit: I approached a large theatre company in the US that I have worked with before as a commissioning organization. They are into creating experimental work for young audiences, which I initially thought was a prime audience for the piece, and we agreed to proceed. So we embarked on a year and a half series of workshops with a cast of teenagers.

I started to envision a piece that involved real time online interactions that would bring physical life directly up against cyberspace life; a narrative form that would simply highlight the properties of each. People are so passionate about their online hangouts, and I just wanted to see what would happen.

So I interviewed a number of young adults, put together a cast and started to work on the shape of the experience. The project was going to have a technological component. We dreamed big at the time — we were into developing a kind of real time networked approach to the unfolding of the piece.

It soon became clear that there would need to be two shows: an online show that would proceed for a certain amount of time before a real space show took place; and the real space show would interact with the cyberspace one – hopefully in a seamless manner.

Then, just as we were going into production mode, the economic crisis hit, and the project was axed. So I had to come up with alternative ways to structure and execute the piece that I could manage within my own resources.

Andrew: You say you “just wanted to see what would happen”. Did you pitch that as a project outcome in your brief to the commissioning organization? In other words, was it made explicit from the outset that this work would be wholly experimental? That there were perhaps few precedents at the time?

Whit: Yes. Everyone was marginally comfortable with that. We had also hired a consulting firm to help us figure out the web experience, because not much existed by way of templates. There were going to be aspects of the piece that were very challenging to any organization of any size. Paradigm shifts that I saw happening before our very eyes that most theatre organizations aren’t nimble enough to put into action.

Andrew: Such as?

Whit: Well, marketing for example. Who is it in a theatre organization that tells the story? I began to see that in cyberspace, the employees of an arts organization – the production team, the administration, the artistic leadership, the artists etc. – are the prime communication agents.

Theatre is still used to creating a product, a thing, a production, and then hiring marketers, who shape the ’story’ of the thing and try to sell it to the public. In cyberspace, the artistic director, for instance, has direct access to the people who form the ‘audience’ for the piece. But artistic personnel are notoriously fastidious about talking directly to the public. It’s a status drop or something. They think of their work as the primary focus of their relationship to an audience. But in cyberspace, that relationship is begging to be up-ended.

I saw an opportunity to build a community, where the marketing of the piece was indistinguishable from its content. So I began to say things like “its marketing is its content” which some people found disturbing; as if that couldn’t be the content of a theatre piece. Our partner organization found this aspect particularly challenging.

Andrew: So by virtue of its existence in cyberspace, the company was marketing the production at the same time that it was creating the story and characters for the piece?

Whit: I tend to describe the creative process of this piece as writing a novel on the fly that you are shooting at the same time as a film, that you are broadcasting as soon as you have the dailies, and rehearsing after you take the curtain up!

Andrew: Nice. As you mentioned earlier, there’s also a ‘physical world’ component to Fatebook, the show that will take place in September as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Have you resorted back to ‘traditional’ marketing roles and structures for that?

Whit: We do have plans to undertake traditional marketing techniques at the same time as we carry out the online component. There have been ramifications to that. I am now writing grant applications with slightly grandiose claims about reducing the normal ratios of production to marketing costs. People are very hopeful about the efficacy of communication in cyberspace, but they are also increasingly wary of slight changes in the atmosphere of online communication and it’s almost a totally commercial zone.

Andrew: Is there an absence of morality in virtual space? A relinquishing of responsibility?

Whit: I think that personal responsibility as a concept is in flux because of the interaction of fact and fiction in cyberspace. For instance, people have been entrapped for interacting sexually with under aged youth by policemen posing as youth. It’s difficult to tell where the crime really is. It seems to be an Orwellian sort of thought crime. And people have told me about relationships they’ve had with someone they’ve never met or seen online. They wonder if they are having an affair. I say, “do you have ’sex’?” They say, “well, yes, I guess”. And I say “you’re having an affair”. There’s just so much room for manoeuvring.

Andrew: I’m interested in this notion of blurring fact and fiction online, particularly in relation to building characters that inhabit social media space (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr etc.). Could you describe the character development process and your online relationship with the actors as the director?

Whit: I should point out that the 13 actors working on Fatebook have never all been together in the same room at the same time – until this coming Monday when we start work on the real space show. The actors have devised characters whole cloth out of their own lives. So much of the content for this show is autobiographical. I have been steering the development of character – as co-author – remotely. Facebook and Twitter have been our rehearsal space so far. We created parameters, and identities – in collaboration – and then started interacting in these spaces in a variety of ways.

Andrew: Could you give an example of a parameter?

Whit: I watched and commented individually as I was devising ways of guiding the actors into the situations I envisioned. I wanted certain characters to be ’supernatural’ for example, but I didn’t tell them, I didn’t want them to ‘hit the nail on the head’ so to speak. So I guided them towards certain things by inference. Soon, one character, for instance, was devising a ‘revirginization’ procedure. Eventually, I took almost five months of online interactions and then started compiling, editing, and rewriting.

Ame Montoya - responding to the theme 'Passing Out'. Photo © Matt Saunders

Andrew: I want to pick up on the term ‘real time’. We’ve used it several times now. It’s a term I associate with ‘real time Web’, often used to suggest a demarcation between a static text-based era of the Internet and the current (instantaneous) global communication platform that it has become. What does ‘real time’ mean in the context of Fatebook?

Whit: To me, it means I can communicate with you without making an appointment. We don’t need to get our bodies anywhere and we just pick up where we left off, whenever we want. It’s realer than real time. I’m not sure whether that describes the actuality of real time online, or perhaps more the experience of it.

Andrew: On the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival website Fatebook is described thus: “The action plays out within a labyrinth of screens displaying the shifting cityscapes and intimate spaces in which the characters live. Twelve projectors and live video feeds blur the line between the digital environment and the physical one.” What are the tensions in shifting between digital and physical interfaces in this performance? What does the physical dimension bring to the performance?

Whit: Well, that’s the point, I think. There will be such an immersion in illusion that I’m not sure the participant will necessarily know what is live and what is canned. The environments well be established then mutated. Characters will be communicating across the room, in ways that it will not be clear how much is live. There will also be live green-screened broadcasting. The whole milieu of the performance is illusion. Then there will be a complete meltdown of the piece that will plunk us all into real space and we’ll suddenly see and feel the unmediated room and hear unmediated sound.

Andrew: What do you hope will emerge at that moment of real space recognition?

Whit: I don’t know. I actually think that presence in real space is the holy grail of experience, and proximity against the odds is the miracle. So, I’m not sure what cyber proximity is going to do with the traditional structures of meaning and what cyber availability is going to do to our physical metaphors. I feel like I just want, at this point, to highlight the differences and make them really salient.

Andrew: Thank you very much for your time and insight into the workings of Fatebook.

The experiment is a result of the collaboration between psychologist and theatre practitioner Tania Batzoglou, director Anouke Brook, and project leader Nessah Muthy. I invited Tania, Anouke, Nessah and one of the performers, Lea McKenna-Garcia, to discuss the project in more detail.

Diana Damian: Nessah, where did the idea of Accidental Art come from?

Nessah Muthy: I attended a workshop given by Ruth Little, the literary manager at the Royal Court, in which she was discussing alternate ways of making theatre. She is currently collaborating with scientists to develop what she has called ‘Metabolic Dramaturgy’ – the dramaturgy of non-linear living systems, I wanted to do something similar with psychology, to look at alternative methodologies that could translate into structures and exercises for a new process of making theatre.

Diana Damian: And how did the collaboration emerge between the three of you?

Tania Batzoglou: I have similar interests as my practice based PhD looks exactly at how we can use methods from psychology, particularly from dramatherapy, to allow actors to free up their imagination and access their unconscious, incarnating a character that is not far from who we are. The drama and movement method I have been trained in, Sesame, facilitates this process where the unconscious reveals itself. So we decided to implement this method that works through symbol, metaphor and the use of myths to aid the actor in finding honesty and embodiment in the work.

Anouke Brook: I am also interested, in my directing work, in alternate ways of making theatre, and in the universality of mythology. We chose a Greek myth and looked at the parameters of the project, what structures to build in and how we could implement Tania’s dramatherapy techniques to devise a performance based on Oedipus.

Diana Damian: Nessah, how did the project develop into the twelve hour experiment at the Roundhouse?

Nessah Muthy: The twelve-hour day with Tania and Anouke was influenced by the most successful elements of two previous experiments. The first experiment lasted three hours, and brought together a psychologist, a director and three actors to make a piece of work. Although loose, some interesting ideas came out of it related to how psychology can create a particular relationship between two actors, as well as creating or stimulating empathy rather than sympathy in the audience. There was a very delicate balance that had to be achieved between creating a safe environment for the actors, whose reactions were unscripted, spontaneous and sometimes surprisingly emotional, and stimulating the imagination. The second experiment was a lot more safe and structured, as we chose to look specifically at the unconscious.

Georgia Christou and Tania Batzoglou in rehearsal for Accidental Art

Diana Damian: Lea, you were in the first two experiments and one of the first collaborators. As an actor, how did your process of working develop?

Lea McKenna-Garcia: What carried through was a personal awareness of how to work this way, being available to your first instinct as a performer. It made it much easier to be fresh with a character because of the sense of play and spontaneity. In terms of dealing with the unconscious, you delve into a lot of aspects of yourself that you are not aware of. You act very instinctually, which helps find moments of honesty with the character.

Diana Damian: How did the twelve hours at the Roundhouse unfold?

Tania Batzoglou: We followed the structure of the dramatherapy method Sesame, which focuses a lot on the body as key to accessing the unconscious. We adapted it to the needs of the day, working towards a specific artistic outcome. We were not very strict on following the myth of Oedipus, it just happened that we covered most of the story. The actor was the main attention on stage, and we used few books, torches and even drums that played different roles in the process and the final product. Both what you are attracted to and what you are avoiding belong to you, and we tried to open that to the actors, not let them indulge in one character or moment. Thanks to the build up, it was a smooth process when we reached the free improvisation..

Nessah Muthy: It was important to filter through the exercise, which is why we brought Anouke in, to serve the audience, not to become self-indulgent but to work with limitation and structure.

Anouke Brook: We did not want to invite the audience into a rehearsal, but we wanted to create a finished piece, with a narrative of sorts with drama, pace, variety. We took that on as a challenge in the twelve hours. We played with chronology and created scenes that were not necessarily from the myth. We wanted to give the actors the safe environment and permission to play and explore. As a director you feel a strong responsibility throughout and register empathy, but you have to keep an eye on the overall, you are analytical rather than sympathetic.

Lea McKenna-Garcia: You watched the performers transform themselves, everyone played Oedipus more than once. The audience was seeing that all these people exist amongst these performers, so they can exist in themselves. There was a rule of performance where we accepted that anyone at any point could change. This was a result of the process, where we worked with instructions, playing emotions, characters and situations in various ways. Anouke, Tania and Nessah made sure we never stuck to one character but took the twelve hours to delve into our own selves as well as the myth. This was so valuable.

Daniel Pinto and Georgia Christou in rehearsal for Accidental Art

Diana Damian: How did you negotiate your presence within that character, how did you stop yourself from looking in on yourself?

Lea McKenna-Garcia: In one exercise I ended up playing Oedipus for a very long time, from the discovery of his identity through the blinding. I was blindfolded and the other performers were taunting and pushing me, and this really disorientated me. It got quite scary and uncomfortable, to a point where I wanted to say stop, but was aware that was my reaction. I think you really have to negotiate what kind of personal agony you are willing to get yourself through to find the real experience of a character, and what becomes too much. You don’t have to go kill someone to understand how it feels.

Diana Damian: How do you feel about the audience observing the whole process, not a final performance?

Nessah Muthy: We were considering streaming and filming, but confidentiality was a problem from the beginning. One of the main reasons that stopped us was the lack of power you have in such a situation. This kind of work needs to happen in a safe environment, and any outside presence becomes problematic.

Anouke Brook: I would love it if the audience would just watch the process, since I think there is a real niche for that.

Tania Batzoglou: It would be great if people could watch the twelve hours, but, indeed, audience would affect the intimacy.

Daniel Pinto, Georgia Christou, Tania Batzoglou and Lea McKenna-Garcia in rehearsal for Accidental Art

Diana Damian: What have you discovered about the relationship between psychology and actor training?

Anouke Brook: I am interested in seeing how methods from these experimental processes can directly influence the training of an actor, giving way to more authentic performances. Theatre is always going to involve parameters and limitation, and I want to see how we can use this method to free up, authenticate something that is still traditional.

Tania Batzoglou: I think it could work perfectly. If in a classical training drama school you had the ability to experience this for several hours every week, you create a connection with yourself, your material comes from you unconscious, imagination, your own body.

Anouke Brook: I think it should be part of drama training. As someone who works in drama school education, I think there should be a special period a week where actors can access these parts of themselves, give up the useless hours of fencing and allow these explorations to be part of the curriculum.

Nessah Muthy: I would like to be involved in the process as a playwright, takeing my inspiration from what happens into the rehearsal room, so the script can emerge from these psychological explorations. I want to be able to write from what I see.

Anouke Brook: We see this as the first phase of development, and funding would be a blessing, since it would allow us to develop the project, delve further into the experimentation.

Day 1.

- Your poem evoked a female presence, a woman’s smell, a woman’s face, a figure
pressed against the crowd.

- When did you read the poem?

- Three months ago.

- Go on…

- Smell.

- What kind of smell?

- Toffee apples. Candy floss. Sickly perfume. Cigarettes. Meat.

- Flesh?

- No. Meat.

- Is that all?

- No. Green grass and mud…sloppy mud.

- Ok.

- Your poem talks of a woman walking, but at the fairground I’m standing still. People are coming to me. I’m not going to them.

- What about faces?

- I think I took more photos of women, I generally do. I waited for a body (or several) to go by, revealing a person hidden behind. I stood there with the camera to my eye, watching, waiting, lowering it from time to time to check the screen.

- What about colours?

- Black. People were mostly dressed in black. Colour came from the rides and the blue sky, from different skin colours. Black skin, white skin, red skin, red because of the sun. My red skin, feeling hot round the neck.

- The rides, what about those?

- They’re not just machines, they’re attractions that people cling on to. The movement seems to come more from the noise of people than mechanical motion.

- What other sounds did you hear?

- People’s voices. “What’s that guy doing taking photos?”; “Where’s dad?”; “Let’s meet here later.” Laughter. “Was that a good photo?” Some guy assed about in front of the camera. Music.

- Music?

- BOOM BOOM BOOM to keep up the energy. Mobile phones too. Different phone jingles, Beyonce and Eminem, the kind of stuff kids from the suburbs listen to.

Day 2.

- What was your mood like before leaving for the fairground today?

- Hopeful.

- What preparation did you make ahead of the shoot?

- Emptying memory cards, preparing myself mentally to meet the crowd, not to feel shy. If you’re feeling vulnerable it’s best not to go there. People sense it.

- How do you prepare yourself mentally?

- I say to myself if the shit hits the fan, then it just does. In other words if someone aggresses me because of the photos then just deal with it or run.

- What are the potential sources of fear when taking photos in a crowded place?

- Someone punching me in the face when i’ve got the camera in front of it. Not being able to see all around with my normal scope of vision.

- Tell me about the place you went to.

- It’s a meeting place and a crossroads in a fairground, just next to a ride called the “Boomerang”. There’s a sign that says “meeting point” or “point de rencontre” in French. There are other signs that point to “lost children”, “first aid” and “Exit”.

- Who do you remember from the crossroads?

- It’s hard to depict someone with any degree of precision…wait…I remember a girl letting out a loud sigh right in front of me, then some youngsters who jumped in front of the camera, they were dressed ‘gangster’ style. I remember a group of disabled people in wheelchairs on an outing.

- What happens at this crossroads?

- People collide.

- How do they collide?

- Sometimes saying “sorry”; a girl barged into my bag quite violently and just walked on; youngsters collide and look at each other, maybe thinking “he’s nice” or “she’s nice”; I felt a woman’s breasts in my back but didn’t look round.

- Where did you stand?

- In the same place, all the time. I only moved a few steps to let pushchairs come by.

- Imagine the people as a whole, as an entity, how would you describe them?

- Something sexual. If it’s a single body then it would have to be hermaphrodite. An hermaphrodite in a place for spending energy and money, like a mad supermarket.

- Think of a detail, tiny, precise, the first thing that appears in your mind’s eye, what is it?

- A can scraping under a wheelchair.

- What kind of can?

- An Orangina can, blue, orange and yellow.

- Think of a word somebody spoke, what can you hear?

- “Le petit Ryan” on the loud speaker for lost children.

- What can you hear beyond the crossroads?

- The Booster ride. A tower with a ring that’s propulsed upwards, with people sitting around the ring and screaming.

- How did you feel after the shoot?

- Tired. Dirty shoes. Dust. Back ache. Tense muscles. Satisfied.

- Satisfied with what?

- With the state of my clothes: a beige shirt, green trousers, dirty shoes, thinking that I looked a bit like an explorer with my satchel and camera on my shoulder and some words scribbled on my left hand.

- What did you ‘explore’?

- I explored my limits, and sometimes, those of other people too. Limits of intimidation and fear. It makes you feel part of a place doing a shoot like this. It’s violent and physical. I realised that Paris is still a stranger to me and we don’t always agree.

‘We read all the Greek tragedies, and we thought this one is very exciting, it’s quite funny and it’s quite accessible because it’s fairly domestic, it’s fairly modern. We felt like the characters had a place in the minds of modern young people. It’s not really about gods making things happen. It’s about everybody having collective responsibility for something going very wrong, and everyone being both at fault and admirable in different ways. There’s a kind of moral complexity about it that suits the way we think nowadays. It’s got great potential to be exciting and riveting and profound and sort of philosophical. I think it’s about how human beings react to things, and get things wrong, and how those reactions create a tragedy.

Katherine Tozer as Phaedra. Photo by Bridget Jones.

And how does the often-troublesome ancient chorus fit into this modern, emotionally-realistic world? ‘It’s only a small chorus’ Mike tells me, ‘only four people doing the job of a larger group. But when we asked Timberlake to write this new version she was clearly really keen on the choruses, really excited about their poetic and dramatic potential. And the words she’s written for them are great. Some of them really work with song, really work as lyrics, and a couple of them feel like they just take off into a more choreographic kind of world’.

Next door, the chorus are starting to warm up, singing and stretching together, tuning instruments, pulling faces at each other and laughing. ‘We do lots and lots of games, and playing’ explains Mike. Then he chuckles: ‘we were all being zombies yesterday morning – wanting to really engage a sense of naughtiness, mischief, irreverence and provocation in the chorus. We don’t want them all to be goodies and just stand and listen’.

Katherine Tozer and David Burke (Phaedra and Theseus). Photo by Bridget Jones.

The sense of fun in the rehearsal room is infectious, and I’m soon giggling along with the performers, but as the morning progresses it also becomes clear that these games have a serious aspect. ‘Obviously you have to share focus properly. We’ve done a lot of balancing space stuff, because you have to be very aware of where you are in relation to other characters, particularly as a chorus. We’ve done a lot of games where you’re balancing space, and getting sensitive to what different aspects of the space mean, and what it means to cross someone or be at the opposite side of the space from someone, or to be close’.

The four-woman chorus (‘one of them’s played by a man’) certainly seem to be thriving on this playful approach to the job. They sing, dance, strum guitars and bang drums, improvise, swap clothes and cheerfully muck about, reciting Euripides all the while. Their manner is laid back, focussed, gently self-mocking and thoroughly down to earth. And that, Mike confirms, is an important part of what the company’s about. ‘We wanted to tell ancient stories in fun and exciting and riveting ways. The last show, Out of Chaos, which we toured around Europe, was a multi-lingual, comic rollercoaster of a storytelling show that moved between modern anecdotes and ancient Greek myths. We were exploring the connection between the little interactions that happen on the Tube between strangers and the massive interactions that happened between gods and mortals in Greek myths, and how there’s a lot in common, actually – the way we tell stories now is the way we told stories thousands of years ago. The comedy’s the same. The human interactions are very much the same’.

. Ann Penfold and Katherine Tozer (Nurse and Phaedra). Photo by Bridget Jones.

‘They’re such brilliant, simple stories, these Greek stories’, he continues, ‘but they often get clouded in a mist of incomprehensibility. We want to create generous theatre, we just want it to be really exciting, and interesting, and fun, and moving if possible – and not too long’.

Theatre practice remains strongly rooted in the physical world, but the impact of the real-time Web on the infrastructure of theatre is undeniable. It is changing the way we encounter theatre, the way we learn and talk about it, and it has given rise to new exploratory practice. Performance in virtual online envrionments goes back to the beginning of the Internet (and beyond), but only in the past few years with the Web 2.0 paradigm has it become viable to produce live online performances for live online audiences.

Curious to find out more about the possibilities of performance in this context, I spoke to two artists from The Netherlands about their work with theatre in Second Life (hereafter SL). SL is one of the Web’s largest 3D virtual worlds, built to a great extent by its users who interact and socialize via personal avatars. Joyce Timmerman is a member of the Amsterdam based theatre company Slapelozen. She has a personal interest in SL and sometimes uses it in her creative work. Ze Moo is an “information-artist” and (live)media-expert/consultant based in The Netherlands and in Cyberspace.

Second Life Logo

Andrew Eglinton (AE): Thank you both for taking the time to participate in this online discussion. The aim is to try and paint a picture of what ‘theatre’ in a virtual online environment such as SL might consist of and to find out what some of the implications are for ‘real world’ theatre.

I understand that you’ve both been involved in a particular project that brought live performances in SL to an audience in a venue in Amsterdam. I’d like to start by asking you both to outline the event so that we have a common ground for this discussion.

Ze Moo: First of all, I should point out that Joyce and I met in SL. We share a mutual interest in the field of theatre, and I mean ‘theatre’ in the broadest possible sense of the term. I co-organized the ‘Live Machinima Theatre’ event on August 30th 2008 in Amsterdam in collaboration with the grassroots art & technology lab ‘Meta.Live.Nu‘. Joyce was an essential member of the production team. The show you’re referring to was called Goodbye Dollar. It took place in SL and it fused musical theatre, performance art, stand up comedy and experimental cinema.

Joyce: In Goodbye Dollar, the ‘real’ or physical audience watched the SL performances on a screen in an auditorium in Amsterdam – the venue was De Balie, it’s well known for housing experimental art work. There were numerous acts in Goodbye Dollar by artists from around the world and the SL medium provided the possibility for audiences to interact with the artists.

AE: Interact? In what sense?

Ze Moo: Some audience members had laptop computers and were connected to SL so they could use text or audio chat.

AE: So the audience was split between people in the physical space at De Balie and people logged into SL from around the world, what about the cast and crew?

Ze Moo: The night was divided into time slots and the artists were responsible for the content of each slot. All artists were operating from home, or in studios. In terms of the crew, there was a production team present at De Balie.

AE: What did the production team do?

Ze Moo: The production team (of which Joyce was a part) had to coordinate the programming and facilitate the various technologies used in the event. I directed the whole night at De Balie like a TV channel showing different ‘programmes’ in real time. But for those accessing the event remotely and not logged into SL there was also a live TV stream broadcast on the Web. So we had multiple streams of media running in parallel.

Goodbye Dollar Event viewed from inside De Balie

AE: Let’s move on and talk about the role of the artists. Could I ask both of you to choose one particular artist involved in Goodbye Dollar and describe a particular performance? Starting with Joyce?

Joyce: I’ll talk about the stand-up comedian Lauren Weyland and her show “LaurenLive: The Dollar Undone”. What you saw on a virtual stage in SL was the avatar of a pretty girl combined with Lauren’s deep masculine voice, cracking sexist jokes about men.

Lauren’s performances are all about playing with gender identity and stereotypes. You see the graphic image of a woman but hear the physical voice of a man so you’re always conscious about both levels: the physicality of the actor and the virtual avatar he uses.

The strange thing is of course that as a stand up comedian you are very aware of your audience’s reactions, their laughter, their silence etc., but in SL it’s different. People react and laugh, but you cannot see their faces, you can only hear those logged into SL who use audio headsets.

Ze Moo: Large parts of audiences at Lauren’s performances always use microphone headsets so it’s possible to hear real laughter and comments in real-time about Lauren’s material.

Joyce: This can create a strange effect at times and it’s one of the areas that needs working on if virtual theatre is going to improve in the future. I’d like to be able to see the facial expressions of both the actors and the audience.

AE: Would it be possible to see everyone involved in the performance simultaneously?

Ze Moo: Not at the moment in SL, but it will be possible in the future I am quite sure. People can already project their webcam faces onto their avatars. There have been numerous experiments with that, but technically speaking it’s still at an embryonic stage.

AE: Could you clarify what an avatar is in the context of SL?

Joyce: The avatar is the ‘doll’ you walk around with in SL, you create it yourself by selecting your own appearance, gender, skin colour, shape etc., and you can even become a beast if you want to. This opens up a new range of possibilities for transformation, both for the actors and the audience. In the theatre, you need to use your imagination when it comes to seeing actors perform complex roles. In SL that transformation is immediate and seamless.

AE: So the SL audience no longer needs to suspend its disbelief?

Ze Moo: Virtual theatre is more immersive, like being part of a live, interactive movie.

Joyce: Yes, it is like cinema. More is possible, so as an audience we might expect more; when I see a beast on stage I can accept that it’s an actor who delivers the roar…but in a movie I want to see the beast in all its three dimensional ferocity!

Ze Moo: But imagination definitely still plays a role and in my view the stimulation of the brain in SL with all kinds of visual illusions can be an even more intense experience.

Joyce: Imagination is an interesting aspect of SL right now; everything is possible, but we still tend towards reality. There are artists now who are changing that in SL they are exploring ways of stimulating their audiences’ imagination.

AE: Are the artists beginning to develop a ‘vocabulary’ of performance that is specific to the context of SL?

Joyce: Yes, I think so.

Ze Moo: The ‘Bunnyken’ were created specifically for performance in SL by Arthole in a piece called Orientation. Arthole is a US/Brit art collective who use SL as their main medium.

AE: Was this also part of Goodbye Dollar?

Ze Moo: Yes Arthole performed at the Goodbye Dollar event. They were one of the top art collectives in 2008 to use SL as a medium of expression.

AE: Could you describe their performance in more detail?

Ze Moo: It began in the SL reception area that Arthole had created. The audience was instructed to gather in this space before being told to swap their regular avatars for ‘Bunnyken’ creatures.

Bunnyken in performance Orientation by Arthole

The Arthole members ushered the audience, now dressed in Bunnyken avatars, around the performance space. Don’t forget that this was being observed on the big white De Balie cinema screen in Amsterdam. And since some people in the auditorium had laptops, they were able to participate as Bunnyken.

AE: So an audience watching an audience?

Ze Moo: Yes. In the SL performance, the audience were made to sit in rows in an amphitheatre. They had to listen to strange alien-like speeches; the whole thing had an Orwellian feel to it. There was an atmosphere of intimidation, of control and the speeches were a form of ‘white noise’. Amazingly, most of the SL audience went along with this and did what they were told to do. In the end they arrived in a type of factory where they were made into a sort of pink mud food.

AE: Right…I see. What was the ultimate direction of the piece? Were Arthole working towards a particular outcome?

Ze Moo: A machinima was produced from it a week later (the event was projected on a live Web video stream as I mentioned earlier). Seeing it live on the large auditorium screen was far more impressive than the YouTube viewing experience.

AE: What makes you say that?

Ze Moo: It was the thrill of being there combined with having the option to interact in real time. My aim as director of the experimental ‘live-cross-reality‘ art section of Goodbye Dollar was to try and bridge theatre and film in a way that has not been done before, while at the same time exploring the boundaries of art, media and technology.

AE: Thank you for sharing your accounts of the two performances. Your last point Ze Moo, on bridging theatre and film segues nicely into the last two themes I want to pick up on: ‘liveness’ and interaction. Starting with liveness I’d like to get a sense from both of you of what it was like to be a spectator at this event. Did you feel part of a community in the De Balie auditorium?

Joyce: For me, there was more a sense of community online than in the auditorium, simply because by nature of the virtual environment there was more potential to interact and participate as a virtual audience member then a physical one.

AE: Could you give some concrete examples of interaction?

Joyce: So in the comedy show I mentioned, Lauren Weyland could hear you laugh or speak if you were online. Also, every performance throughout the evening took place in a different SL location; so you had to ‘teleport’ yourself (avatar) to a destination. This act of teleportation engages the audience from the start. Then there was another performance in which the audience could help build a giant tower.

Ze Moo: Interaction options in SL consist of: text chat, voice chat, individualized avatar shape, looks (fashion) & animations (body language). And also: building (aka ‘rezzing’), moving, altering objects and backdrops and environmental sounds. This adds a whole new ‘live narrative’ (non-verbal) layer to communications, that thus far hasn’t been humanly possible.

AE: I’m curious about Joyce’s teleporting. What’s so special about it?

Joyce: Well usually you don’t teleport in such large numbers in SL. Walking in the SL environment is often a solitary thing. But as a group there’s a sense of community just by walking together. It’s very much the same phenomenon you experience in a real life installation or promenade performance.

AE: Thinking about the audience in the auditorium, to what extent would you have to be knowledgeable about SL to appreciate the whole event?

Ze Moo: Good question.

Joyce: SL users got more out of it I think. For audience members who weren’t familiar with SL there was a narrator in the auditorium who provided voice over commentary and explained what was going on. There were also volunteers present, explaining the event on a person-to-person basis.

AE: One final question. How important was it from the production side of the event to create a ‘streamlined’ show? Presumably there were many stops and starts for technical reasons?

Joyce: Actually, it was surprsingly smooth, but Moo was incredibly busy!

Ze Moo: We were all very busy. Getting everyone in the right place at the right time took a tremendous amount of effort. We prepared several months in advance for the event and worked to a tight schedule. In the end it all went much smoother than I had expected. The only serious technical failure was in the video documentation of the event. But I don’t believe it would be possible to completely document/archive such an extensive interactive live experience anyway. That is why we concentrated more on preparing the live event itself. We are doing the same for one of our largest upcoming events of the year: The ElectroSmog Festival in Autumn 2010.

AE: Thank you both very much indeed for your time this evening. It has been a fascinating discussion. I have many more questions to ask and I hope there will be another occasion to explore this further.