Grit: An Interview with Ross MacKay

Tortoise in a Nutshell have had a good few years: 2013 saw the tour of Feral, an ambitious look at the impact of consumerism on a seaside town, while 2012's Grit gave them a public profile that must be the envy of other Scottish object manipulators. 2014 kicks off with the return to Manipulate of Grit, and the charming Ross MacKay spoke about his joy at returning to the place where it began...

What was the inspiration behind Grit - the seed that blossomed, so to speak?

I was working at a school and was really intrigued by the children's perception of war. The boys were constantly playing armies over lunch and their conversations revolved around video games and TV shows that portrayed war quite brutally. 

When I brought this to the team we started exploring the relationship between children and war. We developed this into a ten minute piece about a boy in a sandpit transforming into a child soldier as his environment changed around him. We really liked the piece and thought we could explore the themes further. 

We researched a lot and WarChild gave us access to a lot of first hand accounts.  We were aware how our ideas of innocence and childhood were often in conflict with a lot of experiences of childhood throughout the world. We wanted to examine this but we never felt we could get completely inside these stories having no real concept of what war was really like. 

This is where our story of a war photographer and his daughter become vital as it allowed us to examine the stories at a distance but still hopefully capturing the emotions we felt reading the true stories a lot of the piece is based on. 

Can you tell me a little about your process? I am studying dramaturgy at the moment, and can't get a grip on how a devising process might work - do you define as devising, or is the structure more scripted?

Our pieces are all devised but the devising process for each one is incredibly different. With Grit we started with exploring materials we were interested in. We played a lot with projection and shadow puppetry as we knew the show would be a lot about images. We also played around with paper - it's in some ways quite a fragile material but also very resilient and one we all associated with childhood - drawing and school work. From this exploration we paired up any materials or techniques we discovered with our research: combining real life stories with different techniques to create fragmented scenes. 

These fragments were then shaped, tweaked and molded to fit a narrative that we developed along the way. Our process is always bumpy and full of starts and stops, there was a lot of material for Grit which we explored but left out but hopefully it creates an interesting and imaginative piece of theatre. 

And let's go for the classic: are you 'visual theatre' or object manipulation - feel free to tell me neither, since I know that this is the sort of thing critics love to discuss and and artists hate?

Your right - we do hate this. Mainly because we are never quite sure. We always describe ourselves as visual theatre makers and I suppose for us it just means our initial inspirations are usually quite pictorial. However what we are really inspired by is responding to the world imaginatively. 

Sometimes a scene is led by an object sometimes a piece of music or an atmosphere but I'm never quite sure how to describe that so sticking to calling ourselves 'visual theatre makers' usually does the best job.  

You do have a distinctive style in all of your works... what makes you stick with the 'objects'? And who is inspiring you at the moment?

So many people inspire us- I think one of the main things that unites us as a company as that we seem to often be pulling on the same references. We all love Studio Orka who have been to Imaginate festival a few times and create these amazingly fun and imaginative worlds and we absolutely adore Blind Summit's work. 

Closer to home Shona Reppe has an imagination we are all envious of and we also love Vox Motus who really have carved a way for creating exciting visual theatre in Scotland. 

We also draw a lot of inspiration from sources outside of theatre -  we  went to Jupiter Artland  a few months back and Scaffold by Sam Durant really provoked a lot of discussion amongst us. 

Pixar seems to come up a lot in our conversations too.

And the inevitable... can you say something about your relationship with Manipulate / PAS?

We really are indebted to Manipulate - it has allowed us to seem some great international work  we never would have seen and taken part in some really inspiring workshops. We have really close ties with the festival - one of our first shows The Last Miner was part of the festival three years ago and our latest show Feral was shown there as a work in progress last year. Grit also started its life with Manipulate. Simon Hart approached us and asked if we would like to create a 10 minute piece with support from Dominic Hill. 

We jumped at the chance and started playing around with some of the ideas we were having about Grit.  We then developed the piece into a fuller show for the Fringe and a tour with support from PAS Creative Fund. Coming back now with Grit is great, it really feels like the show has come full circle and we are really pleased that Manipulate are proud enough of what we have created from their support to invite us back.