The Backyard Dramaturgy: Chen-Chieh Sun @ Edfringe 2017

The Backyard Story 

by Puppet Beings Theatre

Venue 26: Summerhall Red Lecture Theatre / Time: 11.45am (50 mins)

August 2, 3: £6 / August 4-6, 8-13, 15-20,22-27: £10

Box office: 0131 560 1581

Answers from Chen-Chieh Sun aka Jack Sun, founding artistic director

What was the inspiration for this performance?
During my teen-age years I read the book ‘The Little Sun,’ written by Liang Lin. There is a description that stirred my imagination, and still touches me. It goes like this: “Seeing the clothes of whole family hanging under the sun in the backyard, makes me feel like it is another form of family reunion.” What a touching scene! It was this line that brought about the creation of The Backyard Story. 

The show uses clothes as the creative material. We make clothes start to move, enabling us to take the audience on a journey full of emotions. We talk about what people may experience in life, such as parent-child relations, love and competition. By using these readily available materials in the ways that we do, we hope our audience will feel touched by the performance.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?
In my opinion the answer is definitely yes. Through performances we can successfully convey our ideas and emotions to audience in an abstract way. There are examples in some demonstrations where people express their appeals by performing a drama. 

Puppet theatre is commonly used in this method of conveying ideas, in part because puppets can be symbolic and are able to show the cruel side of the society sometimes through exaggeration. Thus, it can help people to better understand ideas. So I would say that performance is always a good space for the public discussion of ideas, and puppet theatre plays an important role in that.

How did you become interested in making performance?
Puppet theatre in Taiwan is most commonly associated with highly decorated puppets. By establishing Puppet Beings Theatre in 2000, I wanted to promote puppet arts in children’s theatre while seeking out a new form that combined the contemporary and the traditional, and that gave fresh meaning and attention to puppetry. Besides giving performances, the company provides educational materials and classes for all ages, including professionals.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

In our show we use a red balloon as a way of bringing to life the clothes that have been hung up to dry. The balloon is light and floats in the air. Sometimes we say our dreams are like that. They float in our minds and, of course, sometimes they come true. So the balloon sort of represents a dream, or another world, which comes to life through the other objects.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?
We call our work children’s theatre, but The Backyard Story and our other shows are for parents, and for all adults too. They all watch it together but have different reactions, different thinking. We welcome these different points of view.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
The show has many scenes, each with its own theme but all closely associated with everyday life and therefore immediately familiar. We are telling stories and want to open up people’s imaginations and entertain, but there is also an educational aspect to The Backyard Story that focuses on interpersonal relationships and getting along peaceably with others. 

For example, there’s one part that’s about family. Three pieces of clothing become father, mother and child. I want to express to the audience how the parents treat their child, and to make them think afterwards. As they watch the show, I hope that children and their parents will respond emotionally to what they are experiencing.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

 

One of the most important aspects of Puppet Beings Theatre is the use in performance of everyday objects that are easy to get hold of. We want to show how you can use things from daily life to widen children’s imagination and vision. 

When the audience goes home after the show, we like to think we have inspired parents to play with their children in a similar way, and to be creative using objects from around their homes. You don’t need a beautiful, gorgeous puppet to make puppet theatre or to perform.

 

Meet Dramaturgy: Ben Pettit-Wade @ Edfringe 2016

Meet Fred

Summerhall (Venue 26)

Aug 5-14, 16-21, 23-25 3.55 pm

A cloth puppet fights prejudice every day. Fred just wants to be a regular guy, part of the real world, to get a job, meet a girl and settle down, but when threatened with losing his PLA (Puppetry Living Allowance), Fred’s life begins to spiral out of control.Contains strong language and puppet nudity.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

The inspiration for making Meet Fred came from a week long workshop with Blind Summit, in which we explored bunraku techniques with cloth puppets. Put simply, the inspiration after this week was to create a puppet show that would include our learning disabled artist working with these cloth puppets.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

Hijinx are an inclusive company that works with artists with learning disability. We have a network of academies that train these performers throughout the year in an ongoing process. We worked with the puppets during a 8 month period with the students, exploring ideas and improvising. We then held two separate weeks of intensive R&D, in which we invited 3 of our learning disabled performers to join a number of our non-disabled tutors. It was during this process that the final cast of 7 was found.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I had an inspirational drama teacher at school, before joining Liverpool John Moores to do a BA in Drama. Since then I have become interested in and specialised in making performance that features teams of creatives both with and without learning disability.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

The process of making Meet Fred was fairly typical of the way we make work here at Hijinx. I believe a devising process is one of the best ways to ensure that you can play to everyone’s strengths in a group, something that is very important when working with learning disabled artists. We generally have a minimum 2 your planning and research phase before going into production on any of our professional output. I believe in everyone having a voice within a rehearsal process – for me the role of a director is dramaturgical , to recognise which ideas best serve the story, or concept that we are all trying to create.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I hope that an audience that see’s Meet Fred will be able to both laugh and cry, to feel pity but also joy – our piece is quite open ended at the end. I like this, I like that the audience have to make up their own mind a little on how things end for Fred and the other characters.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Puppetry allows us to separate some of the big issues we are dealing with in the piece, of people’s benefits being cut, questions of identity, control and power in people’s lives and ultimately suicide. By seeing all this through Fred’s eyes the show becomes a satire, and as such we are able to view all that happens to Fred with a degree of separation, which allows us to laugh and something which is actually quite dark.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

Our work fits within a tradition of creating professional theatre that features artists with learning disability. It is not necessarily a particular style, because we all create work differently, but it is an ethos that our stages are more interesting the more diverse those performing on them are. These are company’s like Mind The Gap, Mooms Teatren in Sweden, Theatre Du Cristal in France and Back to Back in Australia. We are all striving to push up the quality of what we do in the belief that it is possible to achieve absolute equality on our stages and that there is an audience for this work.

Marked Dramaturgy: Patrick Colliert @ Edfringe 2016

The Marked   

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) ​  

Aug 3-16, 18-29 13:30 

As a boy, Jack was surrounded by monsters and invisible guardians, as he fought to protect the people he was destined to rule. Now grown, his life on the streets of London is less fantastical. But when a ghost from his past turns up, Jack must harness the power of forgotten myths to defeat her. 

After the sell-out success of The Fantasist, Theatre Témoin return, using mask, puppetry and physical theatre to navigate a haunting, mystical world inspired by real-life stories of homelessness.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

 

In short, homelessness.  There’s an epidemic in this country at the moment of more and more people finding themselves in situations where sleeping rough seems to be the only option. There’s are stories here that are not being told enough. But "homelessness" isn't really a plot for a play is it?  Really what I wanted to explore was the individual stories of people who happened to be, among many other things, homeless, and crucially what was happening inside the heads of these individual people, people who had gone through traumatic experiences. In 2012, I worked in Rwanda with a group of ex-child-combatants turned poets, and witnessed an incredible relationship between poetic, creative, mythological thinking and the ability to bounce back from the darkest of traumas. 

When we began to work on The Marked, a similar relationship with the poetic and mythical began to surface, where people   that we spoke to who had gone through incredible traumas had developed an almost mythical language to speak about the world. This is what I wanted to explore in making this play.

We ran creative workshops for 18 months with people who had experienced homelessness, and explored individuals’ personal mythologies, and the role they play in our lives. 

At the same time we came across a collection of interviews called Myths Over Miami, written by an anthropologist working with Miami street youth. The kids that she interviewed had developed an “urban mythology”, an incredible collection of legends and “truths” about how the world worked.  It was this hybrid belief system that borrowed from urban legend, adult religions, and childish magical thinking to produce a kind of map to make sense of the experiences they were having.  The Mythology included stories about how God had to run away from Heaven in a UFO, and how this allowed demons to infiltrate earth and control people to do bad things, and how there were angels fighting to stop them, but that the angels would always lose.  The children believed when they died they would join the angels in their losing battle.  I mean, this is like, Viking stuff.  It sounds like Valhalla.  But it makes sense when you think about it - everything about these myths was a way of making meaning out of the often harsh experiences in the lives of these street kids.

We had two workshop participants who came on-board as script consultants. One, Sarah MacGuire, is a talented poet and help shaped a great deal of the narrative and language.  She also named the show.  Our other collaborator has asked to remain anonymous but he provided inspiration for a lot of the spirit of the show, particularly the character protagonist, as well a lot of practical detail.

These experiences, and the urban myths we uncovered from Miami, started shaping into an early version of what The Marked has become today.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

The team gathered itself.  Will, Dorie, Patrick and I have been working together for years, and Will was doing a PhD in Mask and Myth at the Central School of Speech and Drama when this whole thing kicked off.  Mask also has a way of turning the invisible into visible and turning the banal into epic, so mask became the obvious material language of the piece.  After we had done a lot of workshops and knew more of what we were after, we held auditions to flesh out the team, we were looking for people who were elegant movers but also honest, vulnerable, gritty performers.  It's two big asks in two traditionally divergent styles, so we held a lot of auditions.  We're so lucky to have found Tom and Bradley, they're both incredible performers.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I was in a touring theatre company of kids aged 8-15 in my hometown that did cut-down Shakespeare plays called The Company of Little Eyases.  Well I say touring, we toured the local libraries where we held free performances.  But those are my very best memories from childhood.  We had a set that we'd install and once it was up we were totally on our own; the directors - the adults - were in the audience and no matter what happened, the show had to go on. 

I remember in my first season (I was snout the tinker, aged 8), 9 year-old Quince got food poisoning, and 13 year-old Hermia was holding her hair back as she got sick into the prop box. I heroically took over the ringing of the fairy-entrance bell. I still remember the thrill of that, and the pride! The show went on

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

I'm a devising director so the process changes every time with every new team.  We keep a fundamental philosophy of "take your time, immerse yourself in a subject, engage with new people, and see what comes out".  I try to listen as much as I can and allow people’s stories to emerge naturally, and balance my attempt at spontaneously reacting to what happens in workshops with my natural tendency to want to plan plan plan.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Well it's an adventure story, right?  Overcoming your demons (especially if they're so present in your life that they haunt you to the point where you end up on the streets) is an epic, heroic task.  I want the audience to experience the same thing they'd experience watching any adventure epic. 

I think people can mistake what kind of play we're presenting when they read the word "homeless" on the flyer.  A few years back we brought The Fantasist which was a puppetry piece about a woman with bipolar disorder, and people saw "bipolar" on the flyer and thought it was going to be some kind of clinical kitchen-sink issues play.  But I'm interested in the visual whirlwind that can be created by a subject.  The subjective experience of bipolar disorder is an absolute visual and emotional feast; it's huge! And we wanted it to be huge onstage.  As is the subjective experience of surviving trauma.  And, if you like, the subjective experience of "homelessness".  It's a helluva ride.  

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

We like to create playful worlds onstage, and with The Marked we set out to create a wonderland. Jack’s life on the streets is mirrored in the fantastical world of his childhood imagination. There’s plenty in the story of a boy who’s homeless that is dark and brutal and honest, but we try tell the story with a magic flare, and make it visually and emotionally enticing. We show its vibrant colours. Mask and puppetry can have a tendency to suck the audience in – it’s a space where your imagination can run wild, and we want our audience to come in with a dreaming mind.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

 

Oh god, I always feel like other people are much better placed to make this call about our work than I am.  They're outside of it and can see it more clearly in the context of the landscape.  Most of us are Lecoq or LISPA trained and you'll see strong influences of that language in the work if you know what you're looking for, but it's very much a starting point, and we've very much gone our own way with it all.  We like fantastical images and real situations.  We're trying to turn the collective eye towards the things that are hardest to face and say, "Dare yourself to look.  We think there's beauty here."  I think a lot of people are doing that, in their way.  I think we probably overlap with a great many traditions.

Suitcase Dramaturgy: Beth Dawson @ Edfringe 2016

The Suitcase Kid

Written by Jacqueline Wilson, adapted by Vicky Ireland

Directed by Beth Dawson

Performed by ETC.

5^th-13^th August (excl. 7^th) @theSpace on Niddry Street (v9)

14.25pm (running at 1 hour)

Spending one week at Mum’s house and then one week at Dad’s, Andy feels as though she lives out of a suitcase, so she escapes into her imagination and into the wonder of her memories of Mulberry Cottage. 

This moving, magical and engaging family show by Children’s Laureate and bestselling author, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, is a musical journey seen through the eyes of Andy and her rabbit friend, Radish, as they learn to adjust to their new homes after Andy’s parents’ divorce.

What was the inspiration for this performance?
The book 'The Suitcase Kid' was well-known to some of our company. In particular its positive messages about blended families appealed and I had read it with my own daughter when she had to get used to having two homes. It has a 'gritty' feel to it too - it's not laid-back easy viewing - there are some difficult issues tackled and we like the fact that it doesn't try to provide a 'right answer' or patronise. It sort of says: yes, blended families are hard to get used to, but it can work. But in a colourful and imaginative way which will appeal to families.


How did you go about gathering the team for it?
We are quite a well-established team and have previously brought work to the festival in 2011 and 2013. We work together full time so our process has become instinctive and intuitive and we often don't even need to speak out ideas out loud any more. We all read the book and had to come up with one word to initiate our ideas - colour was chosen by all five of us. We work with large, young casts. Auditioning for this show was fun because we included puppeteering, workshopping, singing and acting - looking for multi-skilled performers who did not appear to patronise. 

As soon as you say "This is a family show", there is a tendency for auditionees to become melodramatic and lose the truth of the dialogue. We were lucky to find some fantastic performers who make up a large ensemble cast of eighteen - a big number for a fringe show. There are four cast members who were part of our last Edinburgh performance; The Shakespeare Revue, so they understand the way we work and what we look for. We are always searching for a cast who will gel and create a true sense of team. That's very important to us because we are a large team of creatives. In theatre, the more eyes and voices, the better!

How did you become interested in making performance?
We are a really busy company and we make a range of performances from contemporary verbatim pieces to traditional musicals. Ideas come from our five directors and sometimes from members of the company. Then one of us takes the lead as director of a given production. As the director of The Suitcase Kid, I've been making performances for a long time, and as my own tastes have changed and my own family has grown, I've become more interested in making performance for families. 

It's about generating a young audience for theatre and catching them with the wonder and magic at a young age. It's also about the willingness of children to suspend their disbelief so that you can create moments which engender gasps or smiles. The family audience is more vocal so the rewards for a performer or designer/director can be more immediate.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

Yes. I always start with a visual image and we were lucky that Nick Sharratt (illustrator for Jacqueline Wilson) has allowed us to use some of his images. They are vibrant and bold and this automatically gave us a starting point for the performance, which we want to be equally as bright. 

From the initial image we were able to design costumes, stage furniture and set and we use a 'puzzle piece' approach where we look at creating 'moments' of wonder - in this performance these are the snow, the lake sailing and a tiny house inside a tree. We work as a team of MD, designer, puppeteer and director to imagine and interpret these key moments and then we full in the blanks - the moments around them, once we get the company together in July. 

We cast early (December) and keep the cast informed of all design progress so that they arrive to us in July with lines learnt and a sense of the overall aesthetic. Then it's just about seeing if the ideas work in practise. Of course, being an Edinburgh performance in a small venue with only a three hour tech rehearsal can limit us more than when we have the theatre for a week before our London shows, but we try not to let it.




What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Something which literally makes them open their eyes. The colour palette we are using for this show is like a cartoon, like 60s pop-art. There's nothing quite like the feeling of watching the wide-eyed engagement of children at the theatre and that's what we are aiming for. It means that you can tackle tough content and issues, once that engagement is in place. On a personal level as a keen advocate of all that collaborative co-parenting can do in a blended family, I hope that message gets through too.


What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
We love to experiment with puppetry, song, magic and light effects. Particularly with recent developments in LED technology, lighting effects are now more portable; a massive advantage in an Edinburgh show. We work with a puppet-maker who is also a magician and his ideas help us with the 'moments'. 

A well-placed song or piece of music can also help plan for a response from the audience. In this performance there is one song, sung by Andy, the central character, which is poignant and moving and breaks up the lighter parts of the show. We focus on crafting a range of emotional responses - in this way we can also appeal to a wider age range and ensure that adults who are watching aren't bored! 

So many times I've taken my own children to a 'kids show' and been thoroughly disengaged. It's a common error of family theatre to forget that parents/adults have to sit through the show too! That's why this performance hopefully packs an emotive punch as well as being entertaining.


Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
The style of the show is essentially protagonist self-narration, in the same first-person wording as the book itself. This means we see things through the lens of a child, which offers scope to be more imaginative. We were heavily influenced by 'Full House Theatre Company' and their family style. 

There is a mix of song, fantasy sequences and traditional dialogue, so in that way this could be seen as musical theatre. Puppetry has a long historical tradition of use in storytelling and can transcend language and age barriers, so we are excited by its potential to story-tell.

Based on the 1992 novel which won the Children’s Book Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, The Suitcase Kid has been adapted for the stage by top children’s playwright, Vicky Ireland.

The play is a funny and reassuring look at blended families and is told through magic, puppetry and song. Performed by a large company, this bright, colourful production will enchant and delight family audiences with children over the age of seven. 

The Suitcase Kid will be performed at theSpace on Niddry Street from 5^th to 13th August (excl. 5th) at 14.25pm.

Jacqueline Wilson's bestseller is brought to life with puppetry and song by a large cast. Vicky Ireland's exciting adaptation tells the story of young Andy and her rabbit friend, Radish, as they adjust to their new homes following her parents’ divorce. With moments of magic and colourful wonder, this vibrant story by the Children’s Laureate will engage and delight. After sell-out successes in our last two visits to the Festival, ETC returns with a family show suitable for children aged seven and up.

Dramaturgy from egg to flight: Julian Crouch and Saskia Lane on Birdheart

An egg cracks open. A restless spirit emerges.

What will it become?

An intimate and stunning chamber piece of animated theatre created with a sheet of brown paper, found objects, shadows and a box of sand.

A show about transformation, loneliness, and the urge to fly, Birdheart holds a mirror up to humanity. Through a series of animated images built in front of the audiences’ eyes Birdheart creates something achingly beautiful from the humblest of beginnings.

Birdheart was commissioned by VisionIntoArt and National Sawdust’s Curator in Residence programme – part of the New Victory Labworks Artist Residency and Watermill Artist Residency, with additional support from the St Anne’s Warehouse Puppet Lab and the Henson Foundation.


What was the inspiration for this performance?
How did you go about gathering the team for it?

We had been working together in London on another devised show

at the Barbican, The Devil and Mister Punch, and decided we wanted to create a piece that was light on its feet, something that could grow organically and have the ability to perform in both conventional and unconventional spaces, including places that didn't have easy access to theater. 

In thinking about what this show might be, we were drawn to the extraordinary photographs of Chris Jordan which document the tragedy of the Albatross birds of the Midway Atoll. His images show the remains of young birds, who've starved to death while being fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. 

Looking at these images is like looking into a macabre mirror that reflects both ourselves, and our impact on the world.

From this initial springboard, our piece has grown gently over a long period of time, finding its own themes from within, principally identity and solitude and the urge to fly.

How did you become interested in making performance - in particular with puppetry?
The onstage creation of something from nothing is at the very heart of the piece. We wanted the show to be magical but to simultaneously declare the magic by the utilization of ordinary recognizable materials. Puppetry seemed like the ultimate art form to achieve this. 


Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

No. Each show tends to tell you how it needs to be made. This is how this one wanted to be made.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
Obviously we want the audience to be entertained and to be effected emotionally by what they see and the story we tell.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

By predominantly using paper as opposed to pre-made puppets, we are inviting the audience to become an active part in the creative act. In asking them to help us complete something, our hope is that the story will leave with them at the end of the night. 

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
We see Birdheart as live animation rather than a puppet show per se. We use a variety of techniques, but it’s not consciously drawn from any one tradition. 

Currently represented on Broadway with his Tony-nominated scenic design for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the world-renowned theatre designer, director and puppet-maker Julian Crouch has also wowed audiences with Satyagraha (2008 – Metropolitan Opera, New York, USA) the devilishly delightful Shockheaded Peter (1999 – London and internationally) and Wolves in the Walls (2007 – New Victory Theatre, New York, USA).

With her band The Lascivious Biddies the multi-talented Saskia Lane has appeared with artists as diverse as Jay-Z and Beyonce, Marc Ribot and the Kronos Quartet. Together, Julian and Saskia, who have collaborated on several international productions, team up to create their first project as duo puppeteers and performers.

Big F'in Puppets

The uber-marionette is a descendant of the

stone images of the old temples... a rather degenerate form of a god... the last echo of some noble and beautiful art... it will not compete with life - it will go beyond it.

Craig sounds rather pompous and melodramatic here - but everyone was writing like that in 1907. His rejection of the 'emotionalism' of actors suggests that, unlike Wordsworth, who said something about art being the recollection of emotion in tranquility, Craig was not interested in art that reflected on the human, but a spiritual art that transcends the physical.

Unsurprisingly, he dedicated his collection of writings to Blake. He was a romantic, but one who flew on the wings of imagination to invent metaphysical entities. 

Craig would claim that he wasn't literally trying to replace actors with bits of wood, and that he was describing a method of performance - a return to an abstract theatre that refuses to get bogged down in the reality of the actors' experiences on stage, but rejects the trappings of ornamentation for a theatre that pointed to deeper truths.

Yeah, then Brecht said the same sort of thing - all that 'fourth wall' and revealing the mechanics of performance. He used to do puppet shows when he was a kid, too. 

Flighty Dramaturgy: Sita Pieraccini on Bird @ Edfringe 2016

Sita Pieraccini in association with Feral presents

Bird

Inventive physical theatre and mime are enriched by a subtle live soundscape in this nature inspired, timeless tale of friendship, courage, magic and madness

PART OF MADE IN SCOTLAND 2016 

Directed and Performed by Sita Pieraccini 

Dancebase, Studio 1, 5 - 28 August (Mondays off) 16:30 (17:10) 12+

Set in a post-apocalyptic world and within an imaginary wilderness, this tender one-woman show mixes a delicate, live soundscape and a highly physical performance to look at hunger, loss and man-kind’s catastrophic and misguided interference with nature. This imaginative and compelling performance charts the epic journey of a lone human figure in a hostile landscape who forms a touching relationship with a little passing songbird. 

A post-apocalyptic world. One lone, feral

creature, starved of both food and friendship. With only a patch of soil to call her own, she must be ready to seize every small opportunity that might fly by…

Created through inventive clowning, mime and visceral physicality, and enriched by a detailed and subtle soundscape which is performed live, Bird is a timeless tale of friendship, courage, magic and madness, set in a vast and desolate world.

Sita Pieraccini is an actor and theatre maker with a background in visual art and music. After completing her degree in Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, Sita went on to study acting and physical theatre at the Physical Theatre Practice Course in Glasgow. 

Bird is performed with live foley collaborator and musician David Pollock.


What was the inspiration for this performance?
During rehearsals for the graduation show for the physical theatre course at The Arches in 2009, we were looking for incidental performance pieces to occur in between each persons showcase piece. Al Seed, our tutor at the time, asked if any of us had any 'tricks' we could share. 

I originally learned how to do an uncanny bird tweet impression from my dad. His ability to do this always captured my imagination as a child, and naturally, I wanted to be able to do it too - I finally figured it out. I hesitantly shared my bird impression with the group. The act was directed so as I mimed a bird sitting on my finger whilst I did the sound effect. It was quite sweet and charming but also completely ridiculous. 

It never got used in the showcase but I was inspired then by the potential for a whole story to develop about a character and her relationship with this tiny, flightish creature. I was inspired to explore this character more and what things might be revealed in her attempts at befriending a bird.

When an opportunity through Conflux came up to develop a piece of solo work under mentorship from director, Hilary Westlake, I revisited this image and created a short, three minute sketch with musician and sound artist, David Pollock. 

I was inspired to use live sound effects for Bird because it gave more focus to the subtle actions and reactions of the character. It was also a playful and light way of enhancing the world of Bird. My experience developing my skit with Hilary helped inform a more down to earth and more realistic way of performing the material. In short, she helped me take the work a bit more seriously, allowing the implications of situation along with the subtle emotional complexities of the character to shine through a bit more.

It was clear to me, after this initial outing, that I'd tapped into something which was entertaining but also posed questions about the complexities, or indeed, simplicities, of human behaviour somehow. 

Every time I went back to work on it, the world and story of Bird became more defined. I never applied too much pressure to find a finishing point as such, deciding to focus mainly on the development of the central character and her world. The search for a story or narrative arc did come in to the process later on however.

David and I share a similar sense of humour and we enjoyed putting the character through certain situations to see how she would react. We seemed to both be enthusiastic about the piece in similar ways and in this way it was really easy to keep working together. I'm a keen Studio Ghibli fan and admire their attention to detail when it comes to their quirky characters and fantastical narratives. I feel influenced by them and other animations in the creation of Bird and I often try to channel Stitch from 'Lilo and Stitch' a bit in my performance.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I asked people who are close to me to help with the development and the performance of Bird. It was my first solo performance project and I deliberately worked with those I could trust and have fun with. David and I worked together at the CCA for a few years before we started working together creatively on Bird for the first presentation at Pitch. 

We'd been friends for a long time before then and working on Bird would be the first time we would have collaborated on a theatre piece together. I had seen David and his band perform as part of a theatre show called Bluey at The Arches a few years before this, and had always been inspired to use local artists and musicians in live performance.

It was great working with David because we have a similar sense of humour and enjoyed talking about the story of Bird, empathising with the character and what her story brings up on different levels and chatting in depth and how it could also be made into a film. We kept exploring the world of Bird further in each period of development. This led to a natural development in our technique as performer/author and foley artist respectively.

As the show started to grow in length we enlisted the help of David's best friend, Ronnie Phipps who was a lighting technician at The Arches. Ronnie became an integral part of the team for the two Arches presentations we did for Arches Live 2011 and then for Surge in 2012.

How did you become interested in making performance.
I became interested in making performance whilst studying on the Physical Theatre Course. I had been inspired throughout the course by how artists from different disciplines would combine their skills and outlooks to create really original and exciting work. 

I realised that this collaborative, performance focus was something I'd really missed at Art School. I was inspired by other people's work in the group and gradually by more companies such as Theatre Ad Infinitum, Kneehigh Theatre, The Wrong Crowd, Told by an Idiot, Vox Motus, Vanishing Point - most of whom have a speciality for physical storytelling and some of whom are graduates from The Jacques le Coq school in Paris. 

After graduating I had no class ensemble to work with any more

and after a year or so, I decided to focus on what I could create as a solo performer. I continued to train by way of master classes and residencies but craved to be cast by others in their feeling as though this was the best place for me to strengthen my abilities, whilst working on projects. 

Since 2011, I've assisted Angela De Castro on her annual, two week intensive Clown Workshop – How to be A Stupid, as part of London International Mime Festival. Through this role, I have been exposed to rare and advanced training in clown including Clown in Tragic Theatre and Advanced Clown Technique. This experience has also made me more interested in both the performance and creation of theatre.


Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Bird developed intuitively and in line with my own development as a performer and as I learned more about clown and physical comedy. My process in creating Bird was informed by my training in physical theatre as well as the urge to create a piece of performance which allows for a close up look at one character for an extended period of time.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
I hope the audience will enjoy their experience of seeing Bird in that I hope they are entertained but also feel touched and perhaps a little tortured by the central characters journey in some way. The main character in Bird is not asking to be liked, hated or empathised with as such. 

I'm interested in presenting quite a neutral, mundane being whilst also inviting audiences to maybe get caught up a bit in her predicament so as to feel as though their own thoughts or thinking towards the piece might actually influence the outcome of her situation. I'd like the piece to function in a way so as to almost make the audience aware of their own involvement in this strange yet familiar world of Bird.


What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
The piece is performed in relation to or in recognition of the audience on some level. In this way it is quite clown-like, but I don't reference or address the audience directly at any point. Since the girl in the piece is supposed to be the only living creature left in her world, when she looks out, there is an openness to her state which audiences can read into or reflect on or see themselves in. Very deliberately, she is void of any back story. I aimed to create a character and setting where she is concerned only with her current situation.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
I see Bird as a piece of contemporary clown in some ways. The story and ideas behind Bird have informed the style in which it is performed as opposed to m setting out to make a clown show. It's physical storytelling and mime with a tiny bit of puppetry and it is detailed with a subtle sound scape which is performed live.

As well as creating her own work, Sita’s recent credits include A Bench on the Road (Charioteer Theatre) and Skewered Snails (Iron-Oxide). 

Sita is also a singer and bassist as part of Glasgow band, Teencanteen.

Lighting Design Consultation by Alberto Santos Bellido and Ronnie Phipps

Produced by FERAL (Jill Smith & Kathryn Boyle – formerly of The Arches Arts Team)



Development support from CONFLUX and The Actors Space (Barcelona)

Threads of Dramaturgy: José Babin on Le Fil Blanc

“Listen, my love… Listen, my child… Listen to the river…”

There once was a Mountain-Woman, white as snow, who washed away the woes of the world in the waters of a wide river.

One spring day, she heard the cry of wild horses and the noise of chains forced into their noble mouths.

The next day, amidst horrible sounds of metal and fire, the War-Ogre climbed her flanks.

A tale of sound and fury, but of great love

and humanity. Seen through the unusual complicity between a mother and her daughter, this is the story of that spark of life that continues to pulsate its heart beating despite all the horrors endured by a broken land. A mythological tale that is on the side of life…


For this world is desperate for poetry.

What was the inspiration for this performance?
Inhumanity towards women in the name of wars. … every day, still today, in the papers, the web, TV, magazines. But I wanted to treat it in a poetic way, taking the side of life . 

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
José Babin: The musician and the actress playing with me are two long time artistic partners 

How did you become interested in making performance?
From teenage time. I was in a theatre group in school with a very open minded teacher. He kept us from becoming static people who think they can’t realize  their dreams.

Teachers are very important people!

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Yes, but I always get surprised ! I always start by a research with a theme and some matter.

For Threads, I wanted to work on a duet with Nadine (Walsh) . We worked with boxes, sand  and a violin. The musician works with us from the very first day. It is very inspiring.

This work, confronted with the news of the world, revealed the theme of the show. 

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
A moment out of time, a tale of courage and love told in a surreal way. Beauty against war.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
Using a scenic approach that proposes a fragmented dramaturgy.

Space, music, light, time and bodies are fragmented, each embodying a detail from the whole canvas.

Audience puts the pieces together and create his own drawing and feeling.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
I was trained as a corporeal mime and I guess I use the fundamental principles of Decroux in many was in my work.

Research is at the heart of our work.

Always putting ourselves in danger, for fear of standing still. Always pushing further to meet “the Other”. Digging out the hidden from beneath the obvious. Building a contemporary form of theatre that uses matter to express itself. We dig, we search, we do not imagine ourselves the craftsmen of a knowledge we do not possess. 

At Théâtre Incliné, we aspire to create a holistic stage where, for us, puppeteering not only animates the figures that move on the stage, but also all the links between body, sets, lighting, music — in other words, all of the materials that go into creating a theatrical image. Part of the story being written comes from within the actors, through all of the visuals and sounds that “interact with them”.

Æsthetics play a part in the story. We are never found where we are expected but rather where our research takes us. This is our brand of subversion. Steer clear of something that works if it does not serve the story. Our latest show, Threads, carries the voices of women who have been torn and broken throughout all eternity. 

A sand-coloured mythological tale gave them life, amalgamating women’s bodies with their fragmented limbs and war helmets. Our next project, La morsure de l’ange, explores the mental space of an unbalanced character. Filmed shadows appear alongside projectors, screens and scrap metal. It all comes from within us: the material arises and imposes itself on us during the research periods that precede all of our creations.


José Babin, Artistic Director