FAST FORWARD 

Part of Pandemic Songs: a very strange year in the life of Unfolding Theatre.

Spoken by Alex Elliott, Annie Rigby, Luca Rutherford and Michael Barrass.

Luca: Something I’ve really enjoyed about the projects we’ve done this year is there's less of a divide between the professional person and the people receiving the experience. It feels more porous.

Alex: The last time we did Doorstep Stories, the children had written a story out in rainbow colours and presented it to us. Another girl turned up with a cloth bag to put our books in, which she had painted: it’s absolutely gorgeous, and it wasn’t requested, it was just something she wanted to do for us. As you say, Luca, there’s a porosity. And it’s been like visiting new friends. People have been incredibly honest at times about how they’re feeling and what’s happening to them. One mum said: in this year, not only has my relationship broken down, one of my children has had a near nervous breakdown, we've lost our grandmother – all this in the space of a six-minute conversation. The children have not filtered much, either: if they are feeling distracted or distressed or confused, they've let us know immediately. Children have had to decipher stuff that we as adults have been struggling with: what is this? What’s happening with my life? How are our relationships holding together? There's been so much for children to cope with.

Annie: In our business plan for 2022-2026, we’ve planned a project for the first year and the year after that, but then we’re leaving space. We’re not going to define what we’re going to make in those last two years, because we don't really know what stories are going to need to be told. Pre-pandemic you could plot out an artistic plan and think, this feels like it’ll be relevant, this feels like it would land. But that’s completely up in the air now. We're in this experience of trauma and we need to make space for the listening that we're doing. What are we hearing from the artists who are part of Unfolding Theatre – our regular team, and the freelance team that we work with – but also, what are we hearing from those people who've become part of the fabric of who we are, as regular participants? 

A big shift happened during lockdown, because we’ve been at home; I remember Luca saying it’s been really unusual for her as a freelance artist, normally she would be all over the country. And because the touring model for theatres of our scale is so broken, it’s actually financially better to cancel tours than it is to do them. It’s a ridiculous economy. But we’ve been here, and because of that, and the decision to keep operating, and the strangeness of this past year, there’s a richness to what we’re finding, and a deepening of roots. 

Alex: With the small-scale touring model being broken, I wonder if now is the time for us to say: it’s not feasible. And if we tour, we’re going to make sure that we don’t just turn up and disappear, that there’s a genuine benefit for everybody who is there. What's become clear to me is that as a company – for whoever is involved in the creative side, the administrative side, the planning side, as well as those people that we’re co-creating with, as well as the people that we're meeting – the notion of being well, or trying to be as well as you can be, of supporting one another, is absolutely vital. We did four sessions in Ashlington and the women we spoke to were so clear and forthright that the system wasn’t working when it came to supporting their mental well-being; that lockdown had been in some ways a respite from the tyranny of school. We can't walk away from that. It reflects so much that we’ve hoped to say, that we’ve found ways to say but we need to keep on saying, and want people to say for themselves as well. 

Michael: We start from a very different point to some other organisations that might have drafted themselves into communities this year in a way that they hadn’t before. It was a natural progression for us – and it is important for us to make sure that what we’ve been doing over the past 12 months hasn’t just been something that’s kept us busy, and that we’re thinking about how we can extend that work. 

Alex: There’s always been co-creation in our work, but it’s about articulating that far more forcefully, and saying: we are a company that co-creates, people in a room can contribute design ideas, they can contribute ideas about music, about text, about anything they want to respond to, and it's valued in the same way. What we're calling Free School Meals – a new show being made for Northern Stage – was conjured up from several conversations, and while we've put in placeholder ideas, we don’t know what we're working with until we've actually met the children who’ll be part of it, until we've gauged where they're at, what they want to say, and how they want to say it. How do they feel about education, how do they feel about adults making decisions on their behalf? We’re predicting that things might turn out a certain way. But we're also building into the process the idea that they might say: No, we don't want to do it that way.  

Luca: The word artist is easy to throw about, so when we use it, what do we mean? I would say it’s about how do you listen – and how do you listen that then manifests and roots into something else, and lets things grow in a way you can’t control. There have been some weeks when I haven’t had the energy to run a session with Right Now People, the youth steering group. It’s every Monday and some Mondays I’ve wanted to cancel it, but I haven’t, because if I feel like that, maybe those young people feel wobbly. The pandemic has been a journey of great stress, anxiety, panic and hard work – but the work with Unfolding Theatre has given some safety, and a bit of a time to breathe.  

Alex: Listening isn’t something that we can be tokenistic about, not that I think this company has ever been tokenistic about it. What's been great is that we've done weekly catch ups: it’s happened as a result of not being in the same room, but it means I’ve been able to see the development in Right Now People, we've been able to reflect some of the experiences that we've had on the doorstep, and in other encounters. And it's becoming ever clearer that we can't separate this listening from our work. That’s not necessarily the best in terms of a business model: it takes more time and doesn’t necessarily produce an immediate output. But, in terms of integrity, it doesn't feel that we can step back from these people. 

Annie: The question in my mind continually – and especially in the more crisis moments of this pandemic experience – is: what are we for? We’re a theatre company: what are we for on the most basic level? There’s a sense of giving people space, bringing people together, sharing stories, enabling people to experience something that lifts their spirits, that makes them feel like something's come into their life that was positive or fun or creative, or made space for some of those difficult things that they need to talk about. 

The new Arts Council strategy, Let's Create, is a big opportunity for us because it describes how we've always worked. So the exciting thing for us is asking, how does that help us be bolder? Now we're not having to do this really difficult division of what is participation and what is touring, which has always been hard for us to draw apart. The Let’s Create structure makes our work much clearer to describe, and our relationships much clearer to describe. So it’s real opportunity for us to be bolder in our practice with communities. But what does being bolder mean? 

We're doing a pilot in spring 2021 of An Unfolding Theatre: literally a pop-up, flexible structure that we can take into communities. It’s a space of hosting in which relationships can unfold. Alex will be cooking, people can come and make pizzas maybe, or we’re going to do a trial version with an ice-cream van. So that’s bolder because it's more visible, it's not hidden away in a community centre. 

But there's also something bold about being committed to relationships longer term, which I think is a shift. Sometimes I've had a nervousness around what long-term commitment looks like – because can we, as a small company, genuinely offer that commitment? So that boldness might be about saying, it might be difficult to keep running Right Now People, our youth steering group, as a regular commitment, but it feels like the right thing to do. For me that feels exciting – and a big thing about being bolder. 

Press PLAY to find out more about the work that remained constant through the pandemic year.

Press STOP to find out more about the work that couldn’t happen.

Press PAUSE to find out more about the ongoing journey of B-Sides.

Press REWIND to find out about another rich and deep relationship that unfolded during lockdown.