Dramaturgy in a Nutshell: Ragnarok @ manipulate 2018

RAGNARÖK

Tortoise in a Nutshell/Scotland

The world is breaking. Years of frozen winters and endless nights have been followed by raging fires and infernal wars. Small huddles of humanity live in fear of the next attach from the skies. This is the Ragnarök. A glimpse of a new piece in development by multi-award winning company, Tortoise in a Nutshell.

What was the inspiration for this performance?  

The piece draws heavily on the Ragnarok. This is part of Norse mythology and describes the end of times. It features huge battles between gods and giants, ferocious wolves and serpents  big enough to cover the entire world.  

What we became interested in, though was how this might relate to humans on the ground.What would it be like to be living as the world is ending. When you feel so helpless against these huge scale events. 

Do you have any ability to choose your path and make a change or are events so big that your fate is inevitable?

How do you feel your work fits within the remit of the manipulate festival?

Our work is visually led and we focus heavily on creating an atmosphere, a feeling of a world first before entering into the psychology of a story. We draw upon archetypes which hopefully allows the audience to fill in story blanks and project their own emotions onto the stage. 

I think, this is what Manipulate is all about. Work that ignite imaginations before language. 

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? 

I think so. It asks people to watch closely, to listen hard for a concentrated period of time and collectively come together and feel empathy. Place yourself in someone else's shoes.  The best performance is not a didactic argument, it reaches somewhere deeper and more emotional. It is important to be reminded of this. 

Also the world itself is hugely performative, we arguably perform gender, perform social class, perform roles expected of us from our family, our work place, the society we find ourselves in. Now with social media, we have a whole new place to perform. 

The stage is one of the few places though where we publicly acknowledge this performance and is therefore very honest. 

How did you become interested in making performance?

 As a company we all had different routes in but essentially through either youth theatre or classes in school. We all became inspired when we were young and ended up studying theatre at university. This is where we realised we had similar tastes and desire to make visual work. It made sense for us to come together and make the company and produce work that we wanted to see on stage.  

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

This is the first time we are drawing so heavily on a known story so we are concisely unpicking it and trying to find what it means to us. Stripping it down to its building blocks, finding out why the myth resonates for us and then reconstructing it.  So for instance you wont hear the names of Odin or Thor but their presence is rooted into the show. 

The feeling of huge mythic forces out of balance and a world in chaos is our building blocks. 

From there on we experiment. We know we want to play with scale, seeing huge cataclysmic events and then focusing in on its affect at a personal level. So we are playing constantly with theatrically zooming in and out, changing scales of our playing space and the audience's focus. 

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

 Yes and no. It draws heavily upon techniques we have used in previous shows. So for instance we are working with the small scale puppetry and video work seen in Feral and the large scale style puppets we used a little in The Lost Things and Dundee Rep's The BFG.   But this show feels hugely ambitious as we are smashing all these forms together to see what gels and what doesn't. 

You can definitely find threads of techniques and themes that run throughout our work. But we always want to experiment and ty something new so hopefully this will feel like a completely new approach to past subjects. 

Right now as we are making our work in progress, this show feels like we will be taking everything and turning it up to 11. 

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

An atmospheric shock to the system that leaves you wanting more. Or at least the feeling that the seeds are there for this to happen in the final show. 

Fisk Dramaturgy: Ross MacKay @ manipulate

UK Premiere Manipulate Festival 2017

FISK  

by Tortoise in a Nutshell, in co-production with Teater Katapult in association with Macrobert Arts Centre.  

A new devised piece of theatre by award-winning Tortoise in a Nutshell, Fisk (fish), delves into how we manage struggles with our own mental health, with the support of others.  The theatre company, renowned for their innovative puppetry and visual theatre – perform the show in both Danish and English.  

The show welcomes us into the world of Man (Alex Bird), who, in the moment in which he cannot help falling under – meets Fisk (Arran Howie) coming from the depths. In a new highly physical and visual piece – the company draw on their own experiences living with depression and anxiety to create a portrait of how it’s possible to pull through – and how those around us become vital in balancing our brains.  

This new poetic and visual exploration of masculinity, mental health and cups of tea at kitchen tables has been created working in collaboration with Teater Katapult, Aarhus Denmark. This collaboration has allowed Ross, Arran and Alex to stretch their wings and push the scale of their work, working with a diverse creative team. The script was devised with Danish playwright Anne Sophie Oxenvad.

The latest production from Edinburgh based theatre company, Fisk marks a huge step up for the company developing their practice and returning to venues across Scotland taking on bigger spaces. They are proud to be working with Manipulate Festival to premiere the piece in Scotland.  

I always feel kind of guilty when I ask this one, because it's like the relentless merry-go-round of the critical preview. So, I am going to try and get around it... it doesn't really matter what 'visual' or 'physical' theatre actually means, but it does offer a label that sets certain work apart from other work, and operates as a suggestion for marketing purposes: but do you think there is any kind of quality that sets 'visual' theatre apart from 'scripted' theatre that enables a particular kind of theatricality?
Good way to tackle that question. The idea of visual versus scripted means that the semiotics of  spoken words doesn't take precedence and can exist on an equal or lower footing than other aspects of the show. 

This means that the mise-en-scene can dominate, or sometimes it's the music or sometimes it's the expression on a performers face.This means we don't always rely on words to drive the narrative in: sometimes we actively seek a more theatrical method of telling the story. Hopefully in exploring the piece in this way we do create imaginative staging. 

Leaping straight from that to something blunt and obvious: I got excited to see that you have a dramaturg. Does the dramaturg have a specific set of functions within your making process, and can these be observed within the performance?
The Dramaturg was vital to us. In this particular story we were awash with metaphors and Kirstine role was teasing them out and interrogating the journey that they all go on. 

For example: black boil like barnacles are important in the story and Kirstine was keen that this element had its own narrative e and fed into the greater story. As this story is itself a huge metaphor Kirstine was able to help us looking at when to peel back the layers of the show and show glimpses of the truth. 

It's delicate and if we give to much or too little at any point we ruin the journey of the piece so Kirstine was vital there. Also importantly, the playwright was Danish and Kirstine is a great interpreter so she became a conduit to ensure we were all on the same page at many points of the process. 

There's talk in the press release about this production marking out the company's career: how it does it relate to previous work? And has the collaboration changed anything in your process?
It has. Each show we approach brings a slightly different process. We try to make each show unique in style and to make the form work with the content. 

One of the biggest departures here was working with an incredible movement director, Darren Brownlie. We have never worked so expressively with our bodies. Usually the performance is left to the puppets but working with a movement director gave us a whole other layer of language to use. 

Shifting to the content: that seems to be a pretty heavy topic. What was the inspiration for it?
We started out just with an image of a man on a boat and a fish. We didn't have any preconceptions of the theme. But as we continued to explore the piece we realised that time and again the imagery drew parallels to depression. Rather than run from that we decided to go for it. 

And as we pushed we found more and more that this seemed to be the story. On top of this we all had experiences we could relate to whether it was our own depression or witnessing someone else go through it. It felt pertinent and the idea of a young couple going through this. 

One person having to support as another suffered the illness was a story we were talking about a lot but felt we hadn't seen on stage. We felt we had something we could say here, something that would leave the audience with questions. Which is what we like to do.

Do you think that theatre - and especially your approach - can be a good place to address issues about mental health? I am assuming you have not gone for an information packed, 'theatre in education' strategy, but maybe I am wrong again...
No you are quite right. No facts and figures here. We worked really closely with an audience panel of mental health sufferers, carers and those who support in a professional capacity to ensure the show felt truthful and relevant but we wanted to steer clear of it being an issue based show. 

The theme can support a much more emotional journey than that. Also with visual theatre and these big symbolic metaphors it allows space for the audience to project on to it. Mental Health can be experienced in so many different ways and each persons own experience can be very unique even if there is a universality, we wanted people to feel there is space within the visual world to see their own story. Hopefully we have got a little close to that. 

You've been working with PAS for a while. What keeps you connecting with them, and do you think that your work might bear certain hallmarks that mark it as part of 'manipulate'?
They keep asking us back. They have supported us so much through many of our project. We are even staging a new Work In Progress with them during Manipulate so the relationship goes beyond Fisk. 

Manipulate was a huge inspiration for us. When I was a student, Simon Hart gave me a bursary to attend the first ever festival in Dundee. I attended the masterclasses and saw all the shows. It was incredible. I felt part of the community and even more importantly felt inspired to make work. All of s at Tortoise have manipulate marked in our calendars. We draw a lot of inspiration and talking points from the festival so we are delighted to feel our work sits alongside these great artists. 

Fisk opened at Teater Katapult, Aarhus, Denmark, in October 2016.  

Scottish Tour dates  

Macrobert Stirling 26 Jan  

Traverse Theatre Edinburgh 28 Jan  

Eden Court Inverness 1 Feb  

Lemon Tree Aberdeen 3 Feb  

Traverse Theatre Edinburgh 9 - 11 Feb  

Perth 14 Feb  

Eastgate Arts Centre 16 Feb   

Platform Glasgow 20 Feb  

The Company

Tortoise in a Nutshell have toured extensively over 250 performances across 78 cities in 7 countries around the globe – they have taken shows to Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Mexico and toured extensively across the UK.

The company have worked with Imaginate Festival, Cumbernauld Theatre, Manipulate Festival and performed year in year out at the world’s largest arts festival – the Festival Fringe - in their home town of Edinburgh.

2010 – The Last Miner – Idea’s Tap ‘Edinburgh Ideas Fund’ – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

2012 – Grit shortlisted for Arches Brick Award and Total Theatre Award for Emerging Artist or Company Edinburgh Festival Fringe - Bedlam Theatre  

2013 – Feral wins Fringe First, shortlisted Total Theatre Award for Physical / Visual Theatre Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Summerhall.

2014 – Feral returns to Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Underbelly – as part of Made in Scotland’s expo programme.  

2015 – The Lost Things – commissioned by Imaginate Festival. A bespoke piece of theatre for young audiences.  

Danish co-pro background

The relationship with Teater Katapult began when Artistic Director saw Feral in 2014 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of Made in Scotland. Invited to perform at the theatre as part of a Scandinavian tour, the companies began to work together. The EU collaboration has been an exciting way to consider other ways of working and draw on new perspectives when creating theatre.

Ross MacKay – Co-Artistic Director Tortoise in a Nutshell.

“For Tortoise in a Nutshell, art and theatre is about crossing borders and breaking down boundaries. Theatre allows you to put yourselves into someone else's world. It's important then that we can take theatre across cultures and communities. We can share different experiences and outlook on the world. Collaboration allows us to draw on different experiences, different styles of making work and different political climates. International co-productions allow us to create richer and deeper theatre and find the universal experiences even in the smallest of stories and individual of experiences.”

Creative Team

Director: Ross MacKay

Cast/Devisers: Alex Bird and Arran Howie  

Designer: Ana Ines Jabares-Pita

Composer: Jim Harbourne

Lighting Designer: Simon Wilkinson

Movement Director: Darren Brownlie

Production Manager: Andrew Gannon

Dramaturg: Kirstine Christensen

Writer:  Tortoise in a Nutshell and Anne Sophie Oxenvad

Producers: Dawn Taylor and Nick Wong

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.