In February 2013, The Lab Collective created a new theatrical experience designed to address the economic crisis and the world of trade like never before. Entitled The Pinstripe Trilogy, these three individual but connected performances were designed to make audiences think twice about our economic situation. Joe Raynor found out more from the company.

The Lab Collective is made up of Joseph Thorpe, Natalie Scott and Neil Connolly, who met while studying at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. As Thorpe explains, they “wanted to get lots of graduates with different skills together to work on new practices”. The trio are focused on creating innovative site-specific theatre and site-inspired work, with a highly visceral and intimate environment. On their website, the company states: “We tread the line between theatre, installation and art”. Thorpe describes how they first brought their “work to pubs, cafes and market places, providing free theatre… It was all about exposing people to new experimental work in a really unconventional space.” The Lab Collective is continually trying to create accessible and exciting theatre for people who have never experienced theatrical works before.

The Collective is proud that it performs in nontheatrical spaces. Connolly admits that if anything they try to avoid the conventional theatre space, instead searching for new pastures right in the heart of the community. It is no surprise, then, that one of Scott’s “favourite pieces was in Chester castle, in this tenth century tower. The local people of Chester don’t often get to use the tower, it really was a great experience for not only the local community but also for us to provide work for them.”

Pinstripe Trilogy, The Lab Collective’s site-specific production performed in a suite of offices in London, grabbed the economic crisis by the scruff of its neck and gave it a hearty shake. Pinstripe Trilogy is certainly not just raising the issues around the economic downturn, it is revealing the past, present and potential future of our economic situation with a frightfully realistic conclusion. Scott describes how “first comes the banker, Matador, at the beginning of the crisis, then it moves to trying to save what we have by making cuts and taxes, The Bean Counter, and, finally, Trust Fund, reveals the new capitalism which is where we could be heading: privatising childhood.”

The Lab Collective is certainly not shy about taking on highly charged topics, but what is it that makes it different? Connolly says “we’re not trying to provide an answer to what happened, rather to get people thinking, to challenge them on what it is they want and what it is they need”. This manifested itself through the interactive nature of Pinstripe Trilogy, which allows the audience a dialogue with the actors; it forces you to think for yourself on an issue that has given birth to endless scapegoats and slander. The Collective has become a master of playing with its audience, adapting characters so to have maximum impact on their spectators.

Thorpe explains how Matador, first performed in 2010, “changes a lot depending on the audience, I’ve had people say to me afterwards I didn’t realise you were so heavily capitalist and then others will say I didn’t realise you were so heavily liberal”. In all of the three pieces the actors have to be prepared to effectively change their script according to the discussions with the audience, each performance is unique. This is evidence of how well The Lab Collective has come to know its characters: they display great faith in their own, and each other’s, ability to truly become the chosen character on stage.

Pinstripe Trilogy tackles some deep issues. However, Scott says “it is not our job to place the blame on anyone, instead that is the job of the audience”.  They are trying to get people thinking not just about what happened to cause the recession but what the future may hold if we allow big companies to dictate our economic desires. Connolly explains how Matador has given him a complete mix of the good, the bad and the ugly in his two years playing the role: 98 performances, a nomination for Off-West End Award, an audience member attempting to punch him in the head, and a whole pint of beer thrown over him while performing.

Connolly’s Matador, the failed banker, challenges his audience to such a level that some, probably feeling guilty themselves or jealous of Matador’s figure of material success, feel compelled to vent their anger directly at him. Matador, just like The Bean Counter and Trust Fund, is so immersive because The Collective is not just putting on a performance, it is drawing on the audience, removing the spectator/actor barrier and talking with people about issues that matter. It sounds horribly refreshing and what theatre desperately needs.

Find out more about The Lab Collective and the company’s forthcoming work at http://thelabcollective.co.uk/.

Image credit: The Lab Collective

Kate Kelsell was one of five Emerging Writers selected by the In Between Time Festival to engage in critical writing about contemporary performance in new ways.

My reactions to art and performance tend to be instinctive, instantaneous and rarely reticent. On the train returning from the writers-in-residence programme at Bristol’s In Between Time festival, trying to think about public art made my brain feel oppressively cloudy. My impressions were smudged, my ideas vivid, consuming but unformulated. Now, many weeks later, I’m in no doubt that the experience moved and provoked me deeply, and will remain pertinent for many years, but I’ll be damned if I can explain just how and why.

How then does the (oft and fondly mentioned) ‘passer-by’ compute the kind of public art programmed by IBT? How long does it stay with us – and before that, how long does it take us to contextualise it among the rest of life’s debris? If we cannot make sense of it, do we lose its worth? With current chronic lack of funding in the arts forcing discussion about the economic worth of culture, how can we come close to quantifying the spiritual, cognitive and emotional import of outstanding projects such as IBT? Maybe public art, with its desire to open conversations, is at its most powerful when it is beyond words…

Helen Cole’s We See Fireworks is a delicate patch-work of voices recounting profoundly personal and resonant memories of performance. In a sense it can be read as a jubilant calling card for what In Between Time sets out to achieve: the creation of moments which stay with us, altering perspectives and enriching lives. For the most part they are characterised by a tie to the individual’s existence (affiliation to the performance giving it its poignancy) or the differentiation from it, with the sentiment ‘I’d never seen anything like it’ holding the memory outside the normal realm of experience. Wholly personal yet of universal appeal, they speak of our collective fears, anxieties, hopes and dreams, as crystallised in that moment when something on stage, or otherwise, makes sense of it all for a moment.

There is something quasi-mystic about listening to these disembodied voices in the womb-like darkness. An air of religion or mythology – like stories told around an open fire. The speakers recount their tales with outstanding lucidity that often ventures into a fragile lyricism. Memories become enshrined in meaning and mythology over the years. Where and when does this eloquence arise? As Cole puts it: “…they come up with the most beautiful metaphors and evocative language because they cannot think of the right word”. They struggle for details that don’t matter to us – dates and the like – but can describe the performance with poetic clarity.

Curious to know about people’s instant reactions to meditated reflections on performance, I set myself up outside the Old Commonwealth Museum to ask people what they thought of We See Fireworks. I half hoped for a collection of eloquent rhapsodies to mirror the installation itself. What I recorded, unsurprisingly I suppose, were comments on the sensory experience of the installation, rather than its emotional impact, less nuanced and altogether less confident. People expressed the literal experience of the piece (one man to my amusement had initially thought I was part of the performance, sitting and writing notes in the corner), their confusion as they entered the darkness and how they began to understand the format of the piece as their eyes adjusted to the lack of light. They expressed their admiration for the darkness, the vintage light bulbs and the intimate space allowing you to concentrate on the voices. For the most part however, they didn’t elaborate on what those voices meant to them, but preferred to reference accents or “the power of the human voice”, as one woman put it. One woman got goose bumps in time with one of the narrators describing the same sensation. A Japanese girl who spoke broken English explained that she found it difficult to engage with because of the language barrier but was mesmerised by the voices’ rhythms and intonations, and struggled to drag herself away to catch her train. Someone’s jovially delivered account sums this up: “I need longer to think about it, but I think I liked it.” Perhaps then, that deep-set identification evolves with hindsight. Art lies dormant within us until a moment in our lives when we need it – like a rolling stone, it gathers momentum and moss as it tumbles through time.

Many of IBT’s pieces were un-ticketed, finding their home in the streets or in freight containers along the docks, surrounded by the buzz of everyday urban life.  This type of art often goads contention from mainstream press; as Director of Situations Claire Doherty acknowledges, it is often portrayed “…as the uninvited guest… something that is thrust on us… imposing on our public space”. It’s easy to see why the stereotyping of non-artsy types, into a bracket who will benefit from the conversations initiated by encounters outside their familiar experience, can be viewed as patronising. Gleaning positive impressions of its impact is harder. With work that is subtle and fleeting, measuring its enhancement of an atmosphere or environment is nigh-on impossible. Just because it borders on intangibility does not make it less important. Unlike the performances reanimated in We See Fireworks‘ memories, this public art is not trying to help you make sense of anything. If anything it disrupts you, ever so gently, with the hope you will start looking for answers to questions you still have not properly formulated. A pebble that starts the avalanche will not be judged for the destruction it causes.

In Between Time does not survive on spectacle. Take the Fake Moon hovering above College Green, at first disappointing in its very fakeness: it takes imagination to bring its worth into perspective. Less of an intrusion, more an invitation – there only if you choose to acknowledge and indulge it. A stranger in Bristol, I roamed the streets armed with an inadequate map and my non-existent sense of direction seeking out Pete Barrett’s Pave. After mingling with crowds, being distracted by market traders and seductive wafts from various eateries, wandering up dead end alleys and watching the early evening light flutter across Bristol’s waterways, I finally stumbled across the artist at work, as though by chance, as of course is the maker’s intention. Gold leaf, with all its connotations of Renaissance grandeur, being painstakingly applied to dirty cobbles in the shadow of vivid graffiti, contains a timid plurality of possible readings.

I barked at the artist: “I almost gave up hope, I’ve been searching for you for hours” – and was momentarily outraged when he didn’t look up. A young steward pattered over, explaining – not without a tinge of embarrassment – that not interacting is part of his process. What the fuck kind of message does that give about accessibility? I wanted to chat out his intentions and understand his personal perspective on the project. In retrospect, what would this have added?  Works like Pave slip silently into the fabric of urban living. In some instances, such as Alex Bradley’s Field-Test – an otherworldly glen within St Stephen’s Churchyard created from solar powered LED lights and a steel-guitar sound-scape – they alter the space, freshening perceptions of familiar places. As you enter the churchyard the guitars’ moaning twangs sound alluringly sinister, but once inside they are inexplicably calming – you find a home in this new territory. As a passer-by there is nothing to necessarily differentiate this as ‘art’, it merely weaves its way into your path. You need not ‘consume’ or ‘experience’ it in any active sense. It infiltrates your subconscious, as with lost details of the day embellished after sleep in dreams.  I’d like to borrow a phrase from Icon Eye (writing about London’s Grey World): “by making the interaction effortless and invisible, their work is infused with a sense of magic”.

Alongside this merging with the everyday, comes the dissolution of condescending type casts surrounding those likely and unlikely to enjoy and engage with such art. It is precisely this lack of proscription that validates IBT’s claim to be, in some senses, for the city it inhabits. Where the borders between art and life blur, the conversations thus initiated can be seen to deepen our reflection on the world we live in. In We See Fireworks some of the speakers recount instances from real life, framed in a performative light. In the high-mindedness that surrounds debate around the arts, it can be forgotten that they are at base an expression of our humanity. Talk of art need not be segregated inside a different vocabulary, shrink-wrapped in the exclusive realm of those ‘in the know’, and live art like that at IBT opens up the modes of communication by placing unassertive work in city space.

Where these moments gently lapse into the city’s fabric, inside the walls of the Arnolfini, Wickham Theatre and beyond, the ticketed events were challenging and certainly not to all tastes. The vitality and rawness of this content often felt akin to holding fingers over a lacerated vein, trying to stem the flow. Here IBT balances its agendas diplomatically, with these facets serving separate purposes. Is this not also some form of public good? As it is reassuring to know there are men in white coats labouring away in labs testing god knows what, doesn’t it benefit the wider public to know there are people toiling over the questions this art presents? Any anxiety over the inclusiveness of these shows should be assuaged by the promise that the public-facing programme holds. Fake Moon extends a hand to pull you into the dance and dig deeper, if you so choose.

I left Bristol with a lot of open questions. There is a vagueness in my response that first agitated me, so used to making incisive judgements on the art which I encounter. However, I’ve come to feel that with public art, this is precisely the response needed. Fledgling as it may seem, I know it will grow, un-tethered. I see, now, why Barrett chooses not to talk about Pave with passers-by. It is not about arrogance, exclusivity or retaining an air of mystery – this art is just not a convoluted, rarefied conversation designed to lead you in any direction. It is an opening statement.

Image: Bristol to Cardiff

Fevered Sleep is not a theatre company. They are not performance makers. They are artists and they also keep bees – a fact which demonstrates their connection to, and concern for, the world around them. They approach their work in a way more akin to a visual artist than a theatre maker, but they do make work for theatre buildings and for theatre audiences. Contradictory? Perhaps, but it’s these contradictions that have helped Fevered Sleep to chisel out their creative niche. As their new work Above Me the Wide Blue Sky approaches performance at the Young Vic. Laura Turner chats to Artistic Director David Harradine about the show, the role of the artist and Fevered Sleep’s interdisciplinary aesthetic.

The company was established in 1996 by Harradine and fellow Artistic Director Sam Butler. The two met studying at Middlesex University and realised that “there wasn’t really anybody making work that we were that interested in… so it seemed like the obvious thing to do to start our own company”. Upon hearing their plans a tutor frustratingly offered this advice: “don’t expect anything good to happen for ten years”. Harradine tells me he was right, almost to the year. That time, however, has been extremely useful for the company to experiment doing “weird stuff” and figure out “what our process was”.

During that time, Fevered Sleep has made a vast range of work from performance to installation to film to publications to digital art, for a wide ranging audience. Being open to working with pretty much any form is, Harradine confides, both a “really interesting and terrifying way of working”. With every new idea comes a “need to invent the process at the same time as trying to invent the project”, a way of working that places its interest in process over product and that is now coming into its own in our current creative climate. The company is profoundly interested in research and each project grows out of a question, theme or subject matter of interest to them and that they have put a vast amount of effort into researching. It is, Harradine explains, “inevitable that the form always follows on”. Is there a risk that the work may become too intellectual, academic, dry – even inaccessible? No, Harradine continues: “we are always looking for the best way of sharing research with audiences” and defines their aesthetic in the following way: “we aspire to make things which are strange, somehow familiar and very accessible but not of the everyday world”.

Their work is “very serious but playful” and it always has the experience of the audience at heart. Harradine thinks “in images and through light and sound as much as through text and performance”, and you can guarantee that a project by Fevered Sleep will be more of an environment to be in than a work to watch. A Fevered Sleep rehearsal room is “very full of loads of stuff in exciting creative chaos”. Work is carried out “intensely from the very beginning, rather than the more common model of a more relaxed period to begin with then working intensely at the end”. Light, projection, sound and any other media being used are in the rehearsal room from the start and so the process becomes a “constant dialogue” of proposals from one creative to another.

Not directors in the conventional sense, this way of working is one that embraces the times we live in and may be a way forward in the craft. “We live in a slippery time where borders are being contested and we’re interested in that as artists”, states Harradine. The role of the artist and the process of making art is “a really political act” as “artists make decisions that aren’t based on economics”. He believes the artist’s role is “to be as open, attentive, alert and as passionately connected to the world as possible and to report back about that and to offer different kinds of narratives and stories about the world in which we live”.

Above me the Wide Blue Sky offers a narrative about nature, about the world in which we live and “about the profound importance of non-human things to us humans”. It’s about the importance of landscape, geography or the physical landscapes in which we live, of other species and even the importance of weather – because even though it’s become a cliché, the weather actually does affect our character. In the research period the company spent a long time travelling around England discussing these things with people, and Harradine noted how the difference in the weather does make people’s characters very different. On their travels the company collected a huge pile of stories, “some people have told us huge, rambling stories about their entire lives and some have just said ‘oh yeah, I remember that time I fell off that cliff’.”

The collected stories have been combined with academic and theoretical research to create the text for the piece. Above me the Wide Blue Sky is – Harradine realises – “for the first time for a Fevered Sleep production, almost entirely text based. There’s only one performer and she does almost nothing but talk.” What she says is taken from the stories told to the company, but Harradine comments that it isn’t a verbatim piece as the form is entirely different. “It’s more like an extended prose poem, and the images in the poem are absolutely drawn from people’s real experiences”.

The bringing together of people, through theatre, is something Harradine sees as profoundly important. “We live in a time when the idea of community and communication is being degraded and eroded, we’ve gone back to an era of individualism and I think performance does something against this, by bringing together a group of people to communally bear witness to the world”. This, he states, is “all we’re trying to do in this project. To bring together lots of different people’s experiences and observations and to share them as widely as possibly, because we think they’re really important.”

This word “important” is one that crops up a lot in Harradine’s vocabulary, offering the comforting sense that everything he does is extremely thought through and vital. He stresses how, as a young company, you have to be “stubborn, incredibly passionate, and know why you’re doing it and be opportunistic”. He also expresses this advice, and it is obvious that this is how Fevered Sleep was born: “only do it if it’s important to you, don’t do it because you want to be a theatre maker or artist, do it because you have something to say”.

Above Me The Blue Sky plays at Live at LICA in Lancaster and Warwick Arts Centre before moving to the Young Vic from 7 to 28 March. For tickets and more information, visit http://feveredsleep.co.uk/current/above-me-the-wide-blue-sky/.

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Poet Caroline Bird has had an illustrious career to date, winning the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award twice and twice being shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and was a winner of the Poetry London Competition in 2007, and the Peterloo Poetry Competition in 2004, 2003 and 2002. Not content with taking the poetry world by storm, Bird is also a playwright. Her new version of Euripides’s Trojan Women is currently on at The Gate, where it has earned her rave reviews.

I ask if it was daunting, being asked to adapt a classic Greek tragedy. “Definitely,” Bird says, “but in the best possible way. It’s strangely liberating to be given a project that you can’t possibly do justice to – it’s such an audacious idea. Knowing that I couldn’t do justice to it in a way that would make everyone happy kind of set me free to do my own personal response.” And what about the practicalities of writing it – how does one begin to tackle such a task? “I’m a classics enthusiast but not a scholar – I read every translation I could get my hands on, went back and read the Greek myths. Then I put that aside and started writing – I wanted to absorb ideas to start working from. It was similar to creating a new play, except I stuck to the rough structure of the Euripides version. I wanted it to feel as organic as possible, but to be true to the original story.”

As a poet, Bird regularly performs her work. I ask how it felt to not only have other people saying her words, but also to hand over control to the actors and director. She describes the process as “amazing… if I was to think about an audience while I was writing [poetry] I think it would change how I wrote, not necessarily for the better – I need to write the truth not what I think people want to hear. Writing a scene, I’m imagining the charcaters living, not actors on a stage. But then in rehearsal, when you hear the lines out loud, there are lines that work on paper that don’t work in the air.”

Trojan Women went through about eight drafts, and “the process is a lot about listening and constantly revising… you can’t get too precious about any particular line. In rehearsals, in some run-throughs a line will sound terrible and then the actor will find new thoughts and it’ll sound great – and sometimes the other way round – and that’s exciting. That’s the wonderful thing – a writer can write a really dull line and actor can find something wonderful in it that I didn’t put in!”

Bird is enthusiastic about seeing something she “wrote alone in my bedroom” come to life on stage, and more than once, she refers to her script as a “recipe”, a starting point from which something emerges which is greater than the sum of its parts: “a play is constantly in flux, it’s collaborative, a recipe, a set of instructions. It’s not finished without the actors, director, designer, lighting, costumes, set, sound etc to bring it to life. It’s lovely to share with so many people – it makes it bigger than it was in my head.”  She draws parallels with poetry, though: “a good poem does that, too: my favourite poems give me something new every time I read them. A good poem does feel alive – depending on what day it is, what mood you’re in, you’ll see something different. They don’t spell themselves out. They always contain mysteries.”

The script is a jumping-off point for cast and director rather than something sacrosanct, and Bird muses on the differences between working with a text editor for poetry and working with a group of people in a rehearsal room: “A play is much more fluid – it’s not just mine, everyone’s working on it. An editor is trying to make the poet sound the most like themselves. A play belongs to so many different minds and all opinions have to be taken into account.” Again, there are similarities, too. For Bird, both mediums are “about the things that aren’t being said. In Trojan Women it’s not necessary to spell out that a particular scene is really about gender inequality. Similarly, in a poem, it’s a different style but it’s about the space between the lines and the silence.” So there you have it: writing is writing is writing, “the big difference is that a play gets me out of the house a lot more – poetry is a more solitary act.”

The Trojan Women plays at the Gate Theatre until Saturday 15 December. For tickets and more information, visit www.gatetheatre.co.uk.

Image 1: Sam Cox and Louise Brealey in The Trojan Women by Iona Firouzabadi

Image 2: Caroline Bird by Iona Firouzabadi