Output details

Old People, Children and Animals : Scenographic design work for Quarantine Theatre Company extending the researcher’s canon of work with Quarantine in developing new thinking and practices of performance, involving innovative and creative scenographic research that extends the range, depth and application of current scenographic thinking.

Status: Scenographic design work for Quarantine Theatre Company June 2008 Quarantine co-production with Contact Theatre, Manchester and Tramway theatre, Glasgow: Supported by Arts Council England, The Lankelly Chase Foundation and the Granada Foundation. Research questions: How might we explore responsibility, to those close to us, to society, as well as in a theatrical context? How might we challenge the theatrical axiom that we should "never work with children or animals" and thus the idea that there are groups of people who should be excluded from theatre making? Significant features of process, and reflection: The matrix of concerns arising - social, political, formal, psychological – were explored through different modes of reflection and perception, and through personal story and encounter. Situated within a marquee set upon a theatre stage, the production foregrounded a number of binaries in performance and behaviour (such as inside/outside, theatrical /“real”, spectator/participant) from the beginning, a dislocating device returned to on departure from the marquee back into the wider theatrical space. The marquee interior itself provided a contained and ‘known’ environment invoking other [non-theatrical] experiences whilst also maintaining an awareness of its artifice. This aimed to create a conscious ‘responsibility’ via the experience of disjuncture between these two ‘realities’: playhouse and marquee as immersive and narrated reality (for example, the sense of an open air exterior created through the theatrical lighting from outside the marquee and the deliberately non-theatrical lighting within). This double play gives the participant-spectator more agency in navigating senses of reality, as the location and context permits a choice to both suspend disbelief and also to be fully present with those inside: real ‘old people, children and animals’, embodying ideas and values which might more conventionally have been excluded.