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Bill Mitchell… "..I see WildWorks as a vehicle for exploration and experiment.
The work is directly connected to place, and the people of that place. The content or the meaning of these productions doesn’t come from a script, but from the place. First we find a place. It may be urban or rural, wild or industrial. The narrative starts with an instinct, an emotional and sensual response to the place. Sometimes we bring the seeds of a narrative to a site, sometimes we’ll look for those seeds in the landscape and people that we meet.
Once you have chosen a site you have inevitable and very real contact with the people who use and have ‘ownership’ of the site.
There are only two possibilities.
One ignore them, the other work with them.
We choose the latter. The meaning of the piece 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.
I believe that this way of working touches people in profound ways, unlike anything I have experienced in more conventional forms. I have seen its effect, felt it. I have been energised and humbled by it. It has uncovered layers of meaning and resonance that I have found missing in the conventional theatre process. I have received the most moving and passionate feed back from audiences and participants on recent projects. This work attracts new audiences, people who have never wanted to go to the theatre, they see my work as a different form, something immediate, closer to cinema but live. It makes them active, they have no expectations of what may happen to them, they experience the work innocently.The work envelops everyone in a real and sensory world, a world 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 next to you.
I remember a Maltese bulldozer driver who used his skills to make his JCB ‘fight’ an actor, a young Cypriot child with a stunning voice singing a Japanese song late at night with an angel flying overhead, a dozen mud covered bikers in a Cornish clay pit proudly taking a curtain call, and the audience in Godrevy who got so carried away with the action that they ran into the sea to help pull in our fishing nets.
These incidents and more are the meaning of the work.
This work takes place outside the audiences’ expectations, outside conventional theatre spaces and often outside.
WildWorks is a vehicle to allow us to make this work, further this vision.
It has a skilful and professional core team, made up of some Kneehigh veterans who have made this work their own, and young artists who have simply fallen in love with the work. WildWorks is a very Cornish project made up of artists and performing arts workers from all over the world. |
