We were standing on giant's shoulders, following the traditions of the Cornish Ordinalia, ancient community feasts, and our immediate ‘ancestors', Footsbarn and Welfare State International. Touring to European festivals every summer we were heavily influenced by Spanish, Dutch and French companies who were creating very physical, visual work with less emphasis on text.

As we started to explore this new form we discovered new opportunities that were impossible inside a theatre, especially the use of fire and water.

We learnt to relish the vagaries of the weather; audiences seem to have a huge resilience to inclement conditions providing the show is good.

It binds them somehow, and some stories benefit hugely from a degree of wildness in the telling. Some of our best shows have been in horizontal Cornish weather.

The changing light became central to the event. Many shows are timed to sunset, with the thread of the narrative moving from light into darkness.

We learnt to celebrate incidental gifts; the school of dolphins, the timely rumble of thunder, the innocent passer by stumbling onto a scene. And we began to explore the effect on audiences of being in the open air, in twilight, together they were more active, had more commitment to the narrative, were more aware of each other, became more vulnerable, sensual and emotional.

Throughout this time Kneehigh was developing several strands of work that crossed over and fed each other.

Communities invited us to help them celebrate.

We built an Ark in Carn Marth quarry as part of a story that we told to bring in the Millenium.

This was the second event that we made with the community of Lanner and the surrounding villages at Carn Marth Quarry. The boat took two weeks to build and went up huge flames in the most spectacular fashion as the finale to the story of Mrs Noah. 

These were usually one-off events a midsummer bonfire, a procession to open a new school. 

Sometimes these events involved a procession where the audience moved and became part of the spectacle.

This is the 'Beast' of Bodmin carried by people of the town.

We helped start new celebrations; Mazey Day and Golowan, and enliven old ones; Tom Bawcock's Eve and Bodmin Riding.

We ran huge workshops in schools and within the wider community making banners, kites, lanterns and feasts.

In 1991 we began to experiment with a new idea, inviting small groups of audience of around 50 people to journey through the landscape, encountering performance on their wild walk. We learnt a great deal on these early explorations about the nature of the relationship between the performer and the audience, and of how audiences can behave when given these new powers!

In one Wildwalk through Heligan gardens the audience were given the opportunity to release a suspicious character from his chains. After some hot debate amongst themselves, one of the audience members took the keys and threw them into the woods. The actor then had to figure out how to get himself free to make it for his next cue...

Quite quickly we realised that to animate landscape on this scale needed a larger team, and we started working with volunteers from varied walks of life.

We look for landscapes where there is enclosure and therefore surprise, but also distance, the long view, places that can provide both intimate and epic experiences.

At Godrevy the audience were enrolled as tourists on a slightly cranky package tour. This show, Ghostnets, managed delicately to illuminate our relationship with the developing world, impacts of mass tourism and the hopes and dreams of refugees.

We made a pivotal discovery here. One night the tide was far out, and our tribe had to run a long way to get to the waves. We found the audience ran with us, and helped us haul the nets. They had voluntarily stepped over the boundary between artist and audience, and entered our world.

When you work in the landscape there are people who belong to it.

They might live there, work there, walk their dogs, ride their bikes, hide, escape, play. Whether they are there legally or illegally, we don't judge, but choose to include them. We need them. Without them the show is only half made.

We made a version of Antigone in in a disused china clay pit - Hendra Pit, 'Hells Mouth'. On early site visits we noticed that the pit was 'ruled' by trial bikers. The sound of engines would follow us as we made early site visits.. These bikers persisted in roaring through our rehearsals for Hell's Mouth. We recruited them as the warring armies, to do what they did best. They were spectacular in their samurai style flags which could be seen in the distance and over the tops of the bushes as they raced around the pit holding sticks of dynamite

As the show went into performance they got competitive. By the time we reached the end of the run it was heart stopping!

One evening at Hendra Pit, a man in a smart suit appeared who worked for the Ministry of Education and Culture in Malta. He invited us to make a piece of work in Birgu, the once-glorious, ex-capital of Malta, now sadly fallen on hard times. Bill went with two other artists, sculptor David Kemp and writer Mercedes Kemp to research the place and people.

This was another pivotal project; we worked directly with a community and forged the piece from their stories and memories. We made a show about remembering and forgetting, what happens to people when they lose their narrative. And we involved members of the community – the mayor, the bulldozer driver, the boat captain - alongside Cornish and Maltese artists.

Malta wanted to extend the relationship and sought European funding for a transnational project linking Cornwall, Malta and Cyprus. We formed a company of artists from the three countries and decided to experiment with one narrative that would be told in each place, changing and adapting to the landscape and community in each location. We gained permission to use a beautiful and simple Gabriel Garcia Marquez story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.

In Cyprus we chose to work on the Green Line in Nicosia, next to a UN border post, in a derelict taverna closed because of sniper fire. We had to negotiate with the UN for rehearsals and permission to fly our angel. The border had only just been opened; Turkish Cypriot artists came through passport control every day, as did audiences.

These young artists had been born after the island was partitioned; they had never met anyone from the other side of the Green Line. One day in rehearsal Bill asked one of the Turkish Cypriot artists to teach the whole company his village dance. One of the Greek Cypriot artists began openly weeping. This is my dance she said. This is the dance we do in my village.

The third stage of A Very Old Man…, the birth of Wildworks as a new company distinct from and working in collaboration with Kneehigh, brought us home to Cornwall, to the South Quay in Hayle, a Cinderella town, once famous for its heavy engineering, now outshone by its more prosperous and glamorous sister, St Ives. Hayle has waited long for promised investment and development. We worked with the fishermen, the harbourmasters, local schools and young volunteers.

Every night for three weeks an angel flew high over Hayle, and the people of the town came out of their houses to sit on their garden walls and watch.

Most of the places we work in have lost their meaning somehow, communities that are facing dramatic change finding new purpose after the collapse of traditional industry, post-conflict, or on the brink of radical development. It seems to us that peoples ability to heal themselves and move on depends on the narrative they tell about themselves.

Cornwall has had a negative story for a while, dealing with the decline of its traditional industries, and a sense of peripherality, but it genuinely feels that art and creativity are part of the new positive narrative that’s growing here