WILDWORKS is an art led international theatre company founded in 2005 by Bill Mitchell to focus on site-specific events. WILDWORKS makes landscape theatre - large scale spectacular performances and artworks that grow out of their locations: quarries, cliffs, harbours, derelict industrial sites, castles, empty department stores…

Narrative is at the centre of our work. We bring the seeds of a story to a site and weave in the strands that tie people and place together.

As a company we are drawn to stories that are both epic and intimate, human stories that can touch and resonate with audiences across barriers of language, age and nationality.

The WILDWORKS approach to place and community is distinctive. The meaning of the work develops from research, from chance encounters, from probing the feelings, thoughts, stories and memories of people. This is the creative heartbeat, found by attending carefully to the place, the genius loci, and working in a spirit of mutual hospitality with the people who inhabit the physical space. We work in both rural and urban settings, often choosing to work in locations and with communities that are facing dramatic change – finding new purpose after the collapse of traditional industry, post-conflict, or on the brink of radical development.

We believe that this way of working touches people in profound ways. We have seen its effect, felt it. We have been energised and humbled by it. It has uncovered layers of meaning and resonance that we have found missing in the conventional theatre process. This work attracts new audiences, people who have never wanted to go to the theatre, and makes them active. We create sensory worlds where everything is narrative: the light, the night, distance and closeness, from vast to tiny, a flag on the horizon, a character holding a rose so close you can smell it.

WILDPROCESS

WILDWORKS has developed ways of working with communities and giving voice to their values, memories, fears and aspirations. Our methods rely utterly on mutual trust and generosity. We believe that our engagement with a place and its people can only become meaningful through immersing ourselves in the location. This work takes time. The duration is necessary to build relationships, to exchange knowledge, build together, bring into play the knowledge and sensitivity of everyone (the artists’ as well as the residents’) and produce a performance which evokes meaning not only at the local level but also at the universal.

We start the process with detailed preliminary research around the place and the people who inhabit it. We gather memories, images and stories from community members. We hold conversations about the community’s fears and aspirations. We hold events, tea parties and community celebrations to facilitate hospitable spaces where residents may talk to each other. We make ourselves at home and accept hospitality. The stories and images we gather are woven into the fabric of the show. In this way communities experience both a sense of ownership and of connection with other communities that have contributed to the show.

WILDWORKSHOPS are an integral part of the process. We use Landscape Summer Schools to bind new working groups together, to teach outdoor performance skills, and to generate a working culture of open-hearted creativity.

We understand the power of this work in building confidence and pride in host communities. The relationship with the community is honest and clear. We need them. It’s a truly authentic partnership. We are not doing it because it is good for them. We need them to make the work happen. It gives participants a reaffirming experience of art, celebrating what they do, whether they are crane driver, artist or town councillor. It places their culture, aptitudes and environment centre stage.

WILDPLACES

WILDWORKS’ emotional home is Cornwall, where the work started and where many company members live. Our practice draws together several threads that are defining features of the arts and culture ecology of Cornwall. Our work draws its form and inspiration from our geographical peripherality, our extraordinary natural and post-industrial landscapes and from the diversity of artists and art-forms working in close proximity in a narrow peninsula…

Our physical environments are heavily marked by the history of human activity, written into the landscape in so many ways we scarcely notice. We started to explore these narratives of place in Cornwall, but our work has taken us to many different locations: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings flew over the Grand Harbour in Valletta, the Green Line in Nicosia and a working fishing quay in Hayle, Cornwall. Souterrain explored underworlds in seven venues from the coalfields of Northern France to the tin mines of the far Cornish West. The Beautiful Journey launched a boat each night from the Royal Navy Dockyards in Devonport and from the shipyards on the Tyne. Enchanted Palace conjured up the shadows of seven sad princesses out of the shaken fabric of Kensington Palace during renovation works.

The landscape has ghosts; it has narrative and it has meaning. In each new residency we look for powerful locations that have deep resonance for communities in transition.

The event grows on site. Working in the open landscape demands truth above all else - you are working in a very real world, unlike the fictional worlds we create in studios and theatres. So we choose to work with real materials - water, salt, ice, fire, earth. We use local materials whenever we can – in Malta wreckage from the local boatyard; in Hayle rusting steel ladders from the quay and live spider crabs; in Devonport and Tyneside,cranes, scissor lifts, welding equipment. The place is the story is the place.

WILDPEOPLE

The world feels to be a place full of fear and terror where people retreat into the comfort of the familiar. It’s vital for the meaning of our work that it has an international agenda, that we engage with other ways of seeing the world. This internationalism is reflected in the make up of the team, its music, the language used in the work and the international residencies and links we choose to make.

The WILDWORKS extended company includes British, Polish, French, Swedish, Roma, Spanish, Cypriot and Maltese at the last count. We do not share a mother tongue and we often work in non-English speaking locations. It somehow sets us all in a space where difference is valued. We all start as strangers, nothing is taken for granted, not even that we will speak the same language… In A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings we devised a hybrid European language, drawing from Latin, Greek, Italian, Cornish, Spanish, Japanese and English. The language grew organically out of our multinational company and became richer as we travelled. In Souterrain we used French and English as mirrors of each other and audiences on both sides of the Channel were able to both understand their own language and listen to the music of the other.

But our passion is in finding ways to tell our story that go beyond spoken language. We look for the universal languages of music, song, food, gardening, ritual, emotion. We work with music, performance, installation, singing, gardening, cooking, engineering, digital media; we enrol communities in contributing their skills to the story telling, forming choirs and scratch orchestras, building and making things, fishing, tending plants, handling boats. With each production the WILDWORKS temporary community expands; new, unexpected, connections are made that often endure beyond the time-span of the show.

WILDSTORIES

WILDWORKS collect human stories that touch and resonate across boundaries of language, age and nationality. Each WILDWORKS major production has travelled to different locations, sometimes over two or three years.

A common narrative arc binds different productions of the same show together; yet each reflects and reinforces the power of local distinctiveness. Intensive engagement with communities locks the central story into the lives, experiences and memories of the people who live in the physical spaces occupied by each of the final productions.

In each of our shows the story we tell becomes like a palimpsest, like one of those old medieval documents that had been erased and written over time after time. As we travel, the story grows. In A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings we wanted to explore how a self-sustaining community might be affected by dramatic change. In Malta we learned about the power of memory in affirming identity. In Nicosia young Turkish and Greek Cypriot performers made the epiphanic discovery that their villages, which had been separated for 26 years, danced the same dance. Souterrain explored themes of death, lost love, grief and renewal through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The geography of our underworld was mapped from Arcadian villages in Sussex, the fields of graves of the Somme, the mining landscapes of Bethune and Dolcoath. At the Alzheimer hospital in Sotteville-les-Rouen we considered the fate of those who have crossed Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. In Beautiful Journey a confidence whispered by a sailor’s wife over tea and cake at a school fête and a chance conversation with two retired shipbuilding brothers at a Devonport pub became leit motivs in the production.

We always search for the meaning of our narrative in the emotional attachment between people and environment. This is the flesh on the story’s bones.

WILDPRODUCTIONS

WILDWORKS constructs a sensory mix of theatre, ritual, film, music, visual arts and physical theatre that appeals to both head and heart. The company uses whatever is necessary to drive the narrative - forklift trucks, cranes, winches, state-of-the-art lighting, sound and projection systems. The strongest instinct is always to tell the story with and through people.

Our work attracts new audiences, audiences that don’t normally go to the theatre. We actively seek these audiences, inviting them to become part of the worlds we create through engagement with the action, the site, the weather, food and drink, music...For the duration of the show audience and company become a temporary community. This is one of the strengths of this work.

An audience for a piece of landscape theatre behaves completely differently to a conventional theatre audience. They become more alert, looking for clues. Their senses are heightened. They are more aware of each other and of experiencing something new together. The audience is a character, they develop their role as the story develops. They tend to start as voyeurs, then begin to get involved in an active way, as we enrol them in our world. They become protagonists gently. This isn’t traditional ‘audience participation’, but rather, a range of subtle invitations to become temporary residents in the world of the show. We always treat them with respect, never asking them to pretend to be something they are not.

With the promenade experience the audience cannot be a passive observer; they become involved in the performance, they share in the created world, they are an implicit element of the narrative. By using this technique we are asking audiences to engage more with the meaning of the work; we continue to explore how far this engagement can go.