PLAY
Part of Pandemic Songs: a very strange year in the life of Unfolding Theatre.
As told by Artistic Director Annie Rigby, edited by Maddy Costa and with chord suggestions by Ross Millard.
Track 1. The far away plan with some country picking in G major
Going into lockdown we had touring dates booked for Hold On Let Go, and a show that we were going to produce in 2020, B-Sides, building on relationships that we formed in Sunderland making Putting the Band Back Together. It feels really strange to think that was our plan, because it feels so far away from where we are now.
We nearly made a film version of Hold On Let Go, but it’s such a show about hosting, and being convivial, that broadcasting it didn’t feel like the right model for us. We tried to progress ways of working digitally on B-sides as well, but no one was interested in being in a Facebook group or doing creative challenges on their own. I’m not saying they hated it, but it just wasn’t being in a room.
At the same time, other projects were motoring and finding ways to go online – and we were being approached with quite a lot of commissions. I really like a commission – I’m a bit of a wheeler dealer that way. One of the things I like is there’s already a need for the work: sometimes there’s already an audience, sometimes it’s an organisation that wants something to happen. And this year it was a real gift having a major commission, because it kept the wheels turning.
Track 2. Social action with a tight funk rhythm guitar style
Multiverse Lab grew out of an earlier project that we'd made in 2018, called Multiverse Arcade, that asked children and young people: what is the change that we need to make now to save the future? It was about capturing and amplifying young people’s voices, and we presented it as a video and audio installation in Newcastle as part of the Great Exhibition of the North, then toured it to community centres, places where audiences wouldn’t necessarily have come to a city-centre festival.
In one of those places, two people came to see it who now work for Newcastle University and the National Institute of Health Research Newcastle. They loved it as a mechanism for getting diverse communities to feel invited and add their voice, and asked if we’d be interested in making a version around the health research breakthrough people want to see in their lifetimes.
I was interested in the commission because it’s hard to make social action happen: although Multiverse Arcade had over 20,000 visitors, we’d also planned events where we would look at the big talked-about issues that came out, and what we could do about them, but those were not so well-attended. In this commission, there’s already a decision to make change, it’s built into a mechanism for change to happen. That feels really exciting.
Track 3. How hard can it be? It’s a blues riff in E. Try to keep up!
The plan for Multiverse Lab was to make a touring installation that would pop up in communities and high streets. But then, of course, the pandemic hit, and the commissioners asked if we could make a digital version, some kind of interactive website. Multiverse Arcade was a more digitally ambitious project than we’d made before: we’d built relationships with the School of Computing at University of Teeside, and with a digital artist, Simon McKeown, who built bespoke software for us, to respond to people’s hands and voices. If we can do it in a physical installation, I thought, we can do it online. Oh the naivety of the digital not knower very mucher.
I enormously underestimated how complicated it would be to build an interactive website: 14 months later, we’ve only just gone through the snagging and getting it working across different browsers. But we've learned loads through doing it. One thing we’ve discovered is that the way you get the best recordings, and actually get people to make that commitment to record, is you need to be with them. So the delivery has ended up being quite hands-on, with lots of Zoom socials for groups and as public events.
Track 4. Good for the heart – an interlude – tick tock melody
We also got a commission in summer 2020 from Woodhorn Museum, a largely outdoor site in Northumberland, to make an installation for their reopening in September. It was good for my heart to be able to work with them on reopening, because I knew we weren’t going to get to do this with a theatre for a long time.
Track 5. Young Mums run free – arpeggio time
I’ve been talking with the Young Mums Support Network in London for a while: we have an ambition to make a performance piece together around food. The young mothers they’ve been working with have had all kinds of amazing conversations, experiences and insights during lockdown, and they wanted to create something to make those stories public. So they commissioned us to make a short film which we’ve structured around three questions: what was the toughest bit? What are you most proud of? And what are you taking from this into the future?
Garry Lydon, our digital artist, has been putting the film together from my principles of how I think it should be structured: it’s a good example of us taking lots of work and having lots of plates spinning. When I saw the first edit, it was a proper lump-in-throat moment.
Track 6. On your doorstep – with a palm muted riff in D major
The Doorstep Stories project has had a few different phases, and is like a micro version of that space of conviviality that we make in live performance. It began life as a project in Newbiggin, by the sea in Northumberland, where we worked with local schools and a parent-and-toddler group before lockdown to make up stories, which we used to make a digital story trail around the village. Then Doorstep Stories began in Byker and Walker, with our associate artists Luca Rutherford and Alex Elliott going on doorsteps, talking with families, telling stories and making up stories with the children. It was lovely, and we’ve done it rain or shine: during the February 2021 half term we repeated it with Alex making pancakes on a camping gas stove outside people’s houses.
It’s super micro: in terms of reach it’s not a model that makes sense long-term. But of all the things we’ve done in lockdown that we wouldn’t have done otherwise, Doorstep Stories has felt so right.
Track 7. Shewee, sea wee – an interlude – descending blues lick
We did the engagement in Newbiggin before lockdown, but installed the QR codes for the story trail during lockdown, and I remember thinking about all the things we would need – masks, hand sanitiser, a first aid kit? Then Luca phoned and asked: what are we going to do about toilets? Are we going to drive back to our homes in Newcastle? So we also packed a Shewee – and then because it was a beautiful summer’s day we had a swim and that gave me the opportunity to do a little sea wee…!
Track 8. A thinking space – picking in 3
We’d been planning to do some events called UT Socials, or Unfolding Socials, as a platform to bring together interesting people we'd worked with. We thought we might show bits of research or new work, but also bring people together from across those projects, to tell the stories of the company’s different relationships, and its desire to create connections across what might be divides or different perspectives. We’ve also talked intermittently about me doing some kind of blog, but I never get around to it. So the podcast has been another experiment, thinking about these things.
The first three have been a real mixture. The first was largely a conversation about Putting the Band Back Together; the second was a lot about Hold On Let Go, and not touring when you should have been touring. And the third was about relationships beginning. It’s a thinking space, really, a public version of a shared thinking space.
Track 9. Listen to the world – time for some splashy harmonics
So many of our projects, and so many of the commissions that I'm interested in us taking, make space for us to listen to the world. It’s the thing I love about being a small company: it's me directing the shows, but it's also me running a workshop and hearing the stories that are coming out. And that was always the ambition for having associate artists: to grow that pool. We’re on the doorstep chatting to families, and with Right Now People, our youth steering group, we’re talking to young people every week. I don't want us to have an education wing that have these incredible experiences separately. I want to have that ability to say: I'm hearing this, it is saying something about the world, and it is going to make the work that is seen by public audiences richer. It's all meshed together.
Track 10. To furlough, or not to furlough – walking bassline in F Mixolydian
Michael Barrass, our company producer, and I did talk about whether we should furlough ourselves, or furlough one of us, but we just had too much on. Initially we kept going because we had projects that could shift online, and a few commissions came in, so there was an immediate need to keep working. And then Michael did some brilliant fundraising for Doorstep Stories to happen. It was hard to see the space, or when we would go. The only other person we could have furloughed was Garry, but his work is all about our digital content – without him to do that side of things we were going to struggle.
I had real moments of doubt about whether this was the right choice. Alex Kelly from Third Angel, a theatre company based in Sheffield, told me that they furloughed themselves for a period of time, with the logic that it would save money that they could then use to pay freelancers. And then I really thought: we should have done that, that would have been the right thing to do. But we have still employed lots of freelancers in other ways – and there wasn't one right way through this.
Track 11. An extraordinary year – in D
In the early part of lockdown it felt uncomfortable to talk about not being closed. I felt so sensitive to the fact that venues were in chaos, freelancers were in freefall: it felt so inappropriate to say that we’d been able to keep working. But as time has gone on, it's felt more possible. There’s also been more recognition that if you’re an organisation with secure National Portfolio status, but haven’t got the overhead of a building, lockdown has been a very different experience. For us it was easier to navigate, because we're not very rigid about the work that we make. The touring had to stop, but we can still go to your doorstep, we can still develop things online, we can still find ways of making and doing.
I’m really proud that we’ve been open throughout this year. There have been times when I’ve been so tired and frazzled that I’ve wished I’d furloughed us, when I’ve thought maybe there would have been an easier way. But I’m so pleased we didn’t, because it’s been an extraordinary year, and the relationships we’ve built, and how we’ve understood what we’re for, has been so shaped by it. Now we’re asking: how do we keep those relationships when we’re back on the road?
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.
Press FAST FORWARD to find out more about where Unfolding Theatre are heading next.