With May’s Incoming Festival rapidly approaching, I caught up with Jesse Meadows, one of the nine members of the Wardrobe Ensemble. This rather large company will be performing an evolved version of its second show, 33, at the festival before taking it on a summer tour of the USA.
The company’s first show, Riot, took the February 2005 riot at the opening of the Edmonton Ikea store in London as its basis. In this first production, the Wardrobe Ensemble displayed its strong ensemble style, a product of having spent a year on Bristol Old Vic’s Made in Bristol training programme. The company formed after this course and Meadows notes how having trained together meant they were very “in synch” with each other from the start. The company thought up the basis of 33 whilst in Edinburgh with Riot: “We always had this idea of having a ‘real things trilogy’ and that Riot would be the first in that, then we were very interested in making the Chilean miner piece as the second in that trilogy”.
33 was extensively developed through a research and development period at the National Theatre studio, however it was actually a return to a performance the company created at the culmination of their training course. The mining event was “on our radar” at the time and they “had to make a show to take into a school with only two days to make it in, it was called Major Miner and part of it was about the Chilean Miners”. Part of it was also about John Major who hasn’t made it into 33, although somehow Elvis Presley has!
Meadows describes 33 as “so much bigger” than Riot; with this show they were dealing not with an event that took place in a fixed location over 24 hours but one that involved “the miners and the families, the media, the whole of Chile and the world, everyone watching it”. To combat this the company “divided different elements between us and spent the week at the National just covering the walls in information about the miners and things that particularly interested us”. It was through this exploratory period they discovered the playful use of multimedia that has made it into the show. “In the show we use a lot of projection and live feed from a camera, playing around with the ways the men connected with their families and with the outside world and the way that everybody watched it”.
There are two projectors in the show, one that projects onto a standard screen and the other a smaller device hooked up to an onstage camera and used to provide a “double perspective of the miners”. Meadows also elusively mentions this projector is used in other ways and leaves it at that. I do, however, learn that Elvis makes his appearance via projection in an underground hallucination. Meadows elucidates by stating that “underground goes to a very surreal place which the audience very much become a part of”. The show is “immersive… I don’t think people feel like they’re in a mine but we are sort of sucking the audience into this world”.
The world of 33 is constructed of two “very contrasting worlds, flitting between the underground space of the miners and the above ground which is media friendly so there’s lots of choreography and physical theatre”. Its surreal elements have been influenced by American company The TEAM, whose show Mission Drift was highly influential on the company, particularly “the epicness of their shows but also the surreal elements, the magic realism”. With 33 – much as in Mission Drift – they found they could “really play around with the idea of myth and legend, and the idea that we are just another chain in the storytelling of this event”.
Wardrobe Ensemble is also influenced by The TEAM’s ensemble way of making work. Meadows believes “the energy you create with nine bodies in a space is unique and creates an unusual style”. She is aware that 33 is, stylistically, “very different to Riot” but also likes to think there are elements that are the same “it’s about the energy and the precision, it’s frenetic but in a good way and there’s also a clarity and commitment to it”.
33 is a piece that’s “constantly evolving and improving” and Meadows is sure it will be developed further before hitting the USA. Whilst in the States, the company plans to workshop new ideas, although what its new show will be is yet to be determined. “We’ll definitely continue the ‘real things trilogy’ but we won’t be making the next show straight away, we also don’t want to confine ourselves to only making shows about real events”. It plans to develop the scripted piece Sense that it performed in June 2011, but other than that the door is open for Wardrobe Ensemble. “One of the problems with nine”, Meadows admits, “is trying to organise a time when everyone can be in one place”. With some of the members only just graduating from university now is an “exciting and interesting time for the company to think about the future and how we work together”.
The Wardrobe Ensemble kicks off AYT’s INCOMING Festival with 33 on 19 May at the New Diorama Theatre. For more information and tickets, visit NDT’s website.