Catherine Love-Smith

Peter Reder

Posted on May 12, 2013June 12, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

As I chat over the phone to artist Peter Reder about The Contents of a House, his latest project for this year’s Brighton Festival, I’m on a train, contesting with temperamental mobile signal and occasional off-putting jolts. For a conversation about place, my own location is particularly unstable, shifting and continually disrupted. In a sense, this mirrors the format of much of Reder’s work; guided investigations of sites peppered with detours and interruptions.

“I like that you’re telling this story but there are also all the digressions,” says Reder, musing on his continued fascination with the guided tour format. “Like in a travel book, you might enjoy that you find something out about the author as you go along; you perhaps learn about why they’re on this journey themselves. There’s a lot of potential to mix in quite disparate things.”

The latest location that Reder is leading audiences on a journey through is Preston Manor, a historic house and museum just outside Brighton. Reder explains that he was drawn to this particular building because it exists “very much on the fringes of everything” – on the outskirts of Brighton itself and at the peripheries of people’s awareness. With a history stretching back to the Domesday Book, the present house is a mixture of a 1738 rebuilding of the 13th century structure and a series of extensions made in 1905. Now functioning as a museum on Edwardian life, the manor is visited mostly by school groups, but is only vaguely known by many residents of the surrounding area. “I was intrigued by this building which is really interesting in its own right, but which is hovering there kind of half-known,” Reder adds. “There’s an air of mystery around the building.”

Reder also feels that, unlike many of the more famous historic homes across the country, Preston Manor has an accessible, tangible aspect. “What’s attractive is that everything’s quite small scale, it’s very intimate on every level,” he says. “Nothing is of huge significance; it wasn’t lived in by anyone that famous, nothing of national importance happened there. It’s interesting as an example of an Edwardian, relatively wealthy home, but it’s not got that grandeur, so in a way it’s very touchable – you feel it’s on a level that anyone could understand.”

Accessibility is also an element of the guided tour set-up, a format that is instantly familiar to audiences. Although this format is one that Reder has kept returning to in his work, it was one that he initially fell into almost by accident. During a period of research and development for a new show at Somerset House, Reder had a number of found objects to show to a small invited audience and naturally found himself presenting them, guiding spectators through his discoveries. “What I really stumbled on is that speaking about these things was a sort of performance,” he remembers. Intrigued by what could be achieved by adopting this presentational style, it quickly spilled over into the finished work and became a recurring technique.

“I’m aware that it’s a very familiar thing and in some ways I rather enjoy that,” Reder says. “It has a comfortable feel; people know how these things operate.” But he’s not content with simply appropriating this format without interrogating it; there’s a desire in the work to gently provoke and subvert, to acknowledge the way that guided tours traditionally “pander to what people want to hear” and dig away at what latent desires people bring to these tours. In this sense, Reder argues, it’s almost “anti-tourism”.

Recalling one production in Edinburgh, in a context surrounded by lots of real guided tours, Reder explains how they used fabrication to reveal what audiences wanted to hear. “In that particular show I always made up a story about a building that was a phantom, that had been in that place before the current building, which sometimes was true in some of the buildings we used, but at other times was entirely fictional. I realise that’s a very strong desire, that there should be something underneath the layers, that people like the idea of a ruin beneath the current building – a sort of archaeology.” It’s a desire that shares a kind of kinship with the experience of watching theatre; the impulse to peel back layers, to reveal something buried and authentic underneath the artifice.

As Reder has gone on, however, he’s had less recourse to fiction in his work. Whereas previously he would seek to change spaces or populate them with imaginary narratives, now he is more interested in “exploring how they already work and trying to see what I see in them as they currently exist”, noting in this a kind of acceptance. “I want to delve into their reality a bit,” Reder explains, adding, “I would go as far as to say that everything I say in the show is true.”

With this particular project, Preston Manor has revealed more than enough material for Reder to work with. After a lengthy and painstaking process of research, the task was to shape that nebulous mass of history and memory into a piece with a negotiable path through it, a process that Reder admits is “a bit mysterious even to me”. “Bit by bit there is some process of natural sifting where certain things feel more essential than others,” he tentatively continues. “But sometimes what seem like irrelevant things can be very vivid, so it’s a bit hard to explain. There’s some natural selection of the ideas that seem to stay with me and others that slightly fall to the wayside.”

Beyond his guided tours, the interest in space bleeds out into much of Reder’s other work; hisCity of Dreams project, for instance, created live performative maps of a number of cities across the world, fleetingly capturing the living memory of a place through the illusionary machinery of theatre. For Reder, however, place is never the primary concern. “I’d say my major preoccupation is probably to do with memory, but I think that’s played out often in experience of a place,” he says. “They’re very hard to divide, because I think so many memories inhabit landscapes of one kind or another, so what’s conjured up in your memory is full of spaces you’ve experienced and the atmospheres of particular spaces. I think that when you enter a space, even if it’s an entirely unfamiliar one, your memory of other places is always in play – otherwise how do you understand anything?”

Memory, of course, is inevitably delicate and personal, leading to the strong presence of Reder in his work, with The Contents of a House being no exception. “This current show is about the history of Preston Manor, and it’s also about me in some way. But it’s only me in relation to Preston Manor; it’s the bits of my own history that have been prompted by the things I’ve seen in Preston Manor. The two strands are completely enjoined and dependent on each other.”

“I have an anxiety with these performances that they don’t just become entirely self-indulgent, me rambling on about my own memory of things,” Reder is quick to add, expressing his desire to widen that circle of memory to include his audiences. “I’m very interested in the overlap with other people’s memories. As much as some of the things I talk about are genuinely quite personal, they’re there because I think other people will share quite similar associations. Maybe the personal can become a bit more publicly shared.”

This is not interactive theatre in the way it’s typically understood – “there’s no obligation for anyone to share anything” – but there is clearly a hope that those who join the tour might find their own memories being stirred by those that are revealed in the building. “It’s very rewarding to see that I’m not just communing with myself, that it does touch people,” Reder says. Returning to Preston Manor’s lack of historical or national significance – what Reder characterises as its “lightweight” quality – he wonders aloud whether ultimately it’s less about the place itself than the offer it extends to those who come to wander through it.

“I think it’s a place of some quiet reflection; maybe it doesn’t really matter what it’s about. It’s a contemplative space.”

The Ghost Hunter, Old Red Lion Theatre

Posted on May 9, 2013May 23, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

There’s something coincidentally apt about seeing The Ghost Hunter the day after making the trip down to Brighton for Peter Reder’s The Contents of a House. Reder’s show, following the guided tour format that has stitched a fruitful thread through his past work, takes audiences on a journey around the luxurious parlours and creaking back corridors of Preston Manor, sharing snippets of history and spinning stories about the house’s former inhabitants. The piece both copies and undercuts the form it has appropriated, asking implicit questions about how such guided tours select and present their material for the benefit of curious visitors. So, by sheer serendipity, tourism is on my mind.

Dick, the protagonist of Theatre of the Damned’s new show The Ghost Hunter, adopts a role not all that different from Reder’s. The word “hunter” is deceptive; really, Dick is a storyteller, spooking the tourists and schoolchildren of York with fabricated spirits. He runs a ghost tour, capitalising on the city’s crushing weight of history – Viking invasions and massacres, devastating outbreaks of plague – for the sake of a quick buck. He ransacks local history guides for material, dreams up new yarns over pints in local pubs, and knocks together a Ghostbusters-inspired “communication” device from tinfoil and an old wireless. Punters listen avidly to the white noise, Dick tells us, convinced they can hear voices from the afterlife.

Despite the inclusion of a couple of spine-chilling narratives, Stewart Pringle’s one-man play is less about the art of scaring than about why we tell ghost stories in the first place. Tom Richards’ compelling tour guide, sporting full Victoriana and a rather impressive pair of sideburns, is a failed actor with a drinking problem who fell – quite literally – into the job. It’s an easy enough way to make money, he explains, in a city built on ghosts. Lightly playing with the format of which Dick is a master, the intimate set-up places its audience in much the same position as the tourists who come in their hordes to hear about headless women and restless poltergeists, implicitly questioning the desire that drives this trade. And it is a trade – a roaring one, in fact. Gruesome tales are “contagious”, while ghosts are an “intangible resource”. The ghouls never dry up.

But unlike Reder’s upturning of the guided tour format (which at one point acknowledges our love of a good haunting, asking the staff of Preston Manor to share their supernatural experiences), the focus here is on the storyteller rather than his listeners. What makes a person pursue a living selling terror? Switching skilfully from the charismatic gloss of Dick’s “ghost hunter” persona to the wide-eyed confessional of a man grappling with a different kind of haunting – all the while slurping his pint – Richards reels us in bit by bit, lending a melancholy fascination to Pringle’s slowly unfolding monologue. If ghost stories really are, as Dick’s one-time boss says, “a place to put things you’re too scared to look at any more”, what psychological scars might impel the ghost hunter’s strange art?

Sitting beneath all this is an acute awareness of how ghost stories work, their delicate mechanics. While it takes its time to tighten its icy grip, once the plot has us by the throat it isn’t in any hurry to let go, teasing out small details at just a brisk enough rate to keep its audience engrossed without ever giving too much away. Hints are slyly dropped, stories started and abruptly truncated. Pringle’s script is always knowingly holding something back until the end; the “headliner”, as Dick brands it. There might be rooms along the way that we want to linger in – the exploitation of history and memory for profit, for instance, could do with further investigation, and it would be nice to see more of the sharp humour that punctuates the horror – but the show follows the wisdom of the ghost tour in keeping the journey tightly focused. Like the tourists lusting after their souvenir slice of blood and gore, you won’t want to look away.

Taking Wing: Headlong’s Emerging Director Scheme

Posted on May 9, 2013July 1, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The Stage.

Beneath her eloquent enthusiasm, there’s a jangle of nerves in director Blanche McIntyre’s voice as we speak over the phone. It’s easy to understand why. After being widely tipped as one to watch and winning the Critics’ Circle Best Newcomer award, she is now taking on her biggest and riskiest project to date. This spring she is directing a new version of The Seagull with Headlong, touring to main stages around the country. For a director who has cut her teeth on the intimate spaces of the London fringe, it’s a huge leap.

The initiative allowing McIntyre to take this leap is Headlong’s emerging director scheme, which funds an annual midscale tour for a director in the early stages of their career. The programme, now in its fourth year, has previously supported work by Simon Godwin, Natalie Abrahami and Robert Icke, the last of whom is now the company’s associate director. The aim, as Headlong’s executive producer Henny Finch explains, is to stretch the artistic ambition of emerging directors within a touring structure.

“The key difference between this and other schemes is that it’s touring,” she says, keen to highlight the significance of this distinguishing factor. “It’s offering directors an opportunity to direct for a load of different spaces and to find out about how to programme for different audiences up and down the country.” Unlike building-based schemes such as the Donmar’s prestigious resident assistant director programme, Headlong offers emerging and mid-career directors the chance to present work on stages ranging from the Richmond Theatre to Newcastle’s Northern Stage, supported by an experienced creative and technical team.

Headlong’s departing artistic director Rupert Goold also points to the importance of creating work for different venues, explaining how his own early experiences of working both in London and regionally offered him “a great insight into different audiences and spaces”, with a huge impact on his subsequent practice. “I am a firm believer in giving people the opportunity to learn their craft in a practical way,” Goold adds, speaking of his desire to offer directors “chances to test themselves in larger theatres and a route beyond the fringe”.

The scheme that has allowed him to offer those opportunities first emerged through a partnership with the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton, which as executive producer Kate Anderson explains has a long-standing relationship with Headlong and a strong affinity with its work. Seeking to pair an exciting director with a classic text, the project was first trialled with Simon Godwin’s production of A Winter’s Tale in 2010, followed by bold versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and last year’s widely acclaimed Romeo and Juliet. Anderson makes it clear that artistic quality has always been at the scheme’s heart: “It’s led by the work and by practising artists, rather than led by a scheme that has a fixed set of rules. That makes its aspirations very high indeed artistically.”

For McIntyre, this has meant the chance to work on a bold and ambitious scale, offering an interpretation of The Seagull that uses a striking design concept to “go back to what the nature of the play is and do something unusual with it that’s going to bring that out”. Scale is key here; by touring to a selection of midscale venues, the scheme offers a rare opportunity for directors to think outside the small confines of fringe theatres and studio spaces.

“It’s definitely working on a bigger scale,” says Finch, who is concerned that many mid-career directors currently get stuck producing work for smaller venues. The scheme also bridges a troubling career gap for directors and, perhaps even more importantly, does so within a specifically regional context. While many talented directors thrive on the London fringe, the step up to regular work for main stages is a massive and often daunting one. As McIntyre acknowledges, being offered an opportunity to take that step is extremely unusual: “The idea that there is a project that exists which allows someone to take massive risks, to allow a director to really test themselves artistically and creatively – and not only to do that, but to do it on a national scale in a whole range of different venues – is absolutely extraordinary.”

Finch sees Headlong’s scheme as a long term strategy, one that is vital in the current environment of funding cuts. She notes the contrast with her own experience of starting out in the late 1990s, pointing to the opportunities that allowed her and Goold to get where they are. “It’s very different now,” she observes grimly. “So we think we need to keep providing opportunities like the ones we had, which were much easier to come by then when there was much more money around. Because otherwise in 15 years time, when we start to look to the new generation of artistic directors, we’re going to be really impoverished.”

With the search beginning for Goold’s replacement, Finch is firm in stating that this scheme will continue under the company’s new artistic director, expressing a commitment that is echoed at the Nuffield. From both organisations, there is a sense that what they are doing is essential – not just for the individuals who directly benefit, but for the whole landscape of regional and touring theatre. As Anderson concludes, with reserved optimism, “none of us can change the world, but we can all do a little bit”.

Photos: Tristram Kenton

Lucy Ellinson

Posted on April 30, 2013May 20, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

“I think I’ve always been a little bit cross about fourth wall theatre, if I’m really honest,” Lucy Ellinson suddenly admits in the middle of our conversation in the Albany cafe. She’s smiling as she speaks, any crossness buried beneath a warm grin, but a quick glance at her work is enough to confirm this aversion to distanced realism. Her last project was Unlimited Theatre’s Money the Gameshow, a show dissecting the current financial crisis through the interactive format of the TV gameshow, while she’s now appearing in a piece of lightly immersive solo storytelling. Even in the Gate’s thrillingly visceral production of The Trojan Women, in which Ellinson appeared at the end of last year, she had an itching temptation to “sneak under” that invisible barrier, to sit amongst the audience and “do a little agitating”.

“It’s never been part of my understanding of what performance is,” she goes on to explain. “I’ve always felt that it’s a strange condition to set in a room where we’re all clearly present and clearly needing each other to make this thing happen.” For the show she’s currently touring, Jane Packman Company’s A Thousand Shards of Glass, the necessity of this co-presence is not immediately obvious. It’s a show in which everything is told and evoked rather than shown, seeming to share more in common with the radio play than with the rough immediacy of live performance. Yet somehow, as Ellinson is keen to emphasise, the presence of the audience, arranged in a circle, is central to the piece’s effectiveness: “Even though it is a private journey, I feel like there’s a level of engagement that absolutely has to exist in order for the piece to be able to be told.”

The show, described as “a surround-sound adventure which happens mostly in your head”, uses Ellinson’s persuasive storytelling and a vivid soundscape by Lewis Gibson to create an action-fuelled thriller that sprints through the landscape of the imagination, narrating a story of resistance against a dulled corporate world. Despite the relative lack of visual stimulus, its rapid shifting from frame to frame acquires the quality of a graphic novel, just one that’s sketched in the minds of the audience. The graphic novel is also an apt reference point for its invitation to the reader’s imagination, offering just enough to work with. As Ellinson explains, “you look at it, you imagine yourself right into it, but you’re still aware of yourself as a reader, as an outsider – you’re able to do those two things simultaneously, which I really like”. In this sense it’s similar to the radio play, which is “around and inside your mind at the same time”.

I’m reminded of Robert Wilson, who has described his ideal theatre as “a cross between the radio play and the silent movie”; in each genre, both the medium and the imagination are that bit sharper due to the absence of either image or dialogue. Hoping for a similar sharpness, the landscapes that the company wanted to conjure in A Thousand Shards of Glass were always at the forefront of the creative process. “We had a process where we’d talk a lot about the worlds that we were trying to establish; this hyper-realised, capitalist, futuristic world, where all the sensual, visceral elements of life sort of disappeared into this corporate sheen.”

Beyond simply sparking the imagination, Ellinson notes how the show speaks to the current political situation, describing it as “very prescient, very relevant”. This was a piece that felt the impact of both Occupy and the riots, and without reaching for any explicit link, these influences show. For this reason, a level of audience autonomy – “allowing them to take that bit of work on their own shoulders and do something with it” – is essential. Ellinson adds, “it’s much more of an offering, which feels politically more in tune with the themes of the piece”.

There was a similar sense of an offering in Ellinson’s interpretation of her role as the Chorus in The Trojan Women. In Caroline Bird’s new version of the Euripides, the Chorus was pared down to just one individual, an ordinary and ignored pregnant woman. Speaking of the “sense of solidarity” that this device created between the Chorus and the audience, Ellinson describes a “funny little space” that existed between a fourth wall standing and being torn down: “There were moments where the Chorus was asked to laugh – it was scripted ‘the Chorus laughs’ – and the audience would do it, so after a while I sort of let them take that part of me on. It was an interesting blurry line.”

There is a blurry line, too, between the more traditional, text-driven process of The Trojan Women and the collaborative, devised work that is Ellinson’s preferred realm. She reflects that director Christopher Haydon “would have cast me because he knows I’m a deviser and like chirruping up with what I think here, there and everywhere”, before suggesting that collaborative ways of working are becoming more common, regardless of the pre-existence of a text.

“I think it’s just an idea, and then you gather artists around the idea. That certainly seems to be what I’ve encountered in different processes, whether it’s a play or whether it’s a devised piece which becomes a piece of written performance text; the idea is there in the middle, and then I’ve worked with directors who’ve pulled different artists around it. That idea could be an already finished script, or it could be something that we’re going to make. Long may that continue, because then it’s about serving that idea.”

As Ellinson also explains, the artists involved in that process need not all be theatre artists; they could be videographers, jewellery makers, musicians. Making that point, one of Ellinson’s most striking projects over recent months – and the winner of the Arches Brick Award in Edinburgh last year – is Torycore, a furious marriage of austerity politics and death metal music, performed by Ellinson alongside Chris Thorpe and Steve Lawson. Borrowing lyrics from government speeches, the piece is being continually reworked to reflect the latest cuts, with a new outing later this year drawing from the 2013 Budget and the most recent slashes to welfare. As Ellinson bitterly observes, “there’s no end of amazingly, startlingly brutal language coming out of the present government, so there’s lots of text”.

“It’s been really interesting tracking their language,” she continues, mouth stretched in a grim smile. “There’s Iain Duncan Smith saying this is fair, these welfare changes are actually fair, and then there’s this wonderful quote from David Cameron about a year and a half ago saying that ‘we need to redefine the word fair’. It’s been fascinating to me to track the journey of that word in particular and how they’ve used it. They have been absolutely audacious in trying to remould the meaning of the word in the public consciousness in order to open the door for these sorts of ideological cuts.”

In the midst of all this calculated rhetoric, Ellinson recognises that it can be challenging to express one’s own political opinion. This difficulty to speak out is part of the impetus behind another of her ongoing projects, One Minute Manifesto, which will be returning to Battersea Arts Centre in May. Offering participants their very own soapbox and a platform to address as many or as few people as they like, the simple premise is to speak on a chosen subject for 60 seconds. The aim is that it facilitates the airing of those passionate opinions that might otherwise remain unspoken, something Ellinson has grown increasingly galvanised by: “the more I do it, the more I feel it’s really quite an important exercise to do”.

Ellinson tells one story of a woman who was paralysed by nerves during her allotted one minute, unable to wrench out any words before the time was up. Afterwards they went for a walk that lasted over an hour, speaking about this woman’s life, her opinions, her view of the world. She was “hugely articulate”, yet she struggled to believe that her thoughts were worth hearing. For the very reasons illustrated by this example, the conversation that happens around that minute is just as important as the minute itself. “That timing, that 60 seconds, it’s deliberately there to provoke a response to want to continue to talk.”

Ultimately, this seems to be the driving force behind much of Ellinson’s work – getting people talking. As Ellinson drains the last of her tea and I gather my things, we continue chatting; about some recent work Ellinson was involved with at the Women of the World Festival, about getting primary school girls energised by the idea of feminism, about Ellinson’s connection with Forest Fringe and their current residency at the Gate. Even as we’re both glancing at our watches, conscious of the need to continue with our days, the pull of that conversation is hard to resist.

Transform Festival 2013

Posted on April 30, 2013May 12, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

I’m folded into a striped deckchair, grass at my feet and a glass of wine in my hand, watching a performer in a bear costume drag a tied-up man onto a bandstand decked with fairy lights. At the end of my first day in Leeds, this is the unlikely scene in which I find myself in the buzzing foyer of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, suitably reimagined for the theatre’s third annual Transform Festival. I’m in the Park, a slice of the English summer transplanted into the Tardis-like building. The brief for designer-in-residence Hannah Sibai, I’m told, was to bring a bit of Leeds into the Playhouse, creating a welcoming space where visitors can relax, drink, stumble upon some art.

It’s a dialogue with the city that characterises Transform, which this year carries the strapline “my Leeds, my city”. Distinctive among other theatre and performance festivals in a similar mould, many of which host the same nomadic work and artists, Transform is injected with the unique flavour of Leeds as a place. Sites are important, as are people. When I grab coffee, cake and a quick chat with festival producer Amy Letman, she tells me that the programme grew from a scribbled map of the city, a neater version of which now appears in the Transform brochure that sits open on the table between us. Tracing her hands over the different areas of Leeds as she discusses the work, Letman talks me through the connection of each piece and each artist to the city, explaining the desire to take work out of the Playhouse and into unexpected locations.

One of these unexpected locations is the Royal Armouries Tiltyard, an impressive outdoor space situated in the middle of an over-developed ghost town – all sleek apartment blocks and yawning open spaces. Audiences are led here from the West Yorkshire Playhouse – the connecting “hub” of the sprawling festival – via a meandering audio walk through the city’s streets. Navigators, a piece created by Leeds University students following workshops with artists Invisible Flock, is well meaning but hindered by the disruptions and limitations of its physical surroundings, less in dialogue with its site than tussling with it. The evocative collage of voices pumped into our ears has to compete with traffic and early evening urban bustle, its delicate spell too easily broken by the intrusion of today’s city into the mental images it conjures of Leeds’ history.

The piece of theatre that occupies the outdoor space we eventually arrive at, situated at a dynamic nexus between Leeds old and new, is Slung Low’s The Johnny Eck and Dave Toole Show. A show that is mostly about trying to make a show, Dave Toole’s achievements as a dancer and performer are contained within a meta-theatrical structure that attempts to sidestep Toole’s own gruff modesty, while Toole himself just wants to tell the story of American freak show performer Johnny Eck; a show within a show within a show. The strange spectacle of the freak show in this circus-like space is also central to the conceit, complicating the gaze of the audience and the deliberate naivety of the humour. There’s always a slight jagged sense of unease.

With the afterglow of the Paralympics now faded to the stony cold reality of slashes to disability benefits, Slung Low are necessarily unflinching about the reality of ongoing prejudice faced by the disabled community. As well as being playful and celebratory – and, ultimately, uplifting – the piece unleashes an accusatory sting, sneering at the supposed “changing of perceptions” that was achieved by the Paralympics in London. By demonstrating the parallels with Eck’s prejudice-tainted experiences back in the 1930s, the piece suggests that not so much has changed after all. But the show is also about Leeds, about its inhabitants’ own particular brand of self-deprecation and eschewal of “fuss”, about the landscape of past and present that forms the show’s twilit backdrop. It’s a celebration for a city that doesn’t like to shout about its achievements.

Back in the Park space for that night’s Live Art Bistro, what’s striking – other than the heartening numbers turning out for performance art on a weekday evening – is the mix of people in the room. There are students, Playhouse staff, audiences who have wandered in after another show, and a wide range of artists, many of whom are involved with the festival in some way. As several of the individuals I speak to note, the transformation (forgive the pun) of this space has turned it into a place where artists want to linger and chat, immediately forming a relationship with the building through simple proximity. As Letman puts it, Transform has “ignited the enthusiasm of artists in the city”, forging links with the wider artistic community that might not otherwise exist.

The benefits of these links for both artists and theatre are immediately evident in the events taking place around the edges of the festival, including last week’s scratch programme and Emerge night and the playful live art interventions that now dance around the groups drinking and chatting on the surrounding deckchairs and picnic tables. Alongside the bear, there’s a story archive collecting narratives of Leeds; a witty, knowing take on food and gender stereotypes from The Souvenirs; a series of statements about the world punctuated by the knocking back of drinks. Just before I reluctantly leave this indoor bubble of summertime to make my way back to my hotel, one of the lightly swaying performers on the bandstand stage gulps down another shot. One for the road.

As artist Ellie Harrison recognises, there’s a lot to be angry about right now. On the morning of my journey to Leeds for the Transform festival, Maria Miller delivered her first keynote speech as culture secretary, in which she insisted on the need for artists to make the argument for their economic value. I avoided reading the speech in full, mainly for my sanity and the sake of my fellow train passengers, but the news stories emerging from it and the stream of rage bursting from my Twitter feed were enough to get me riled. So it’s with this sense of political anger – a simmering background frustration that keeps erupting in response to more and more outrageous policies – that I enter Harrison’s installation The Rage Receptacle.

The piece, housed in a compact black box up the road from the West Yorkshire Playhouse on Eastgate, is a lightly playful exploration of the things that make us angry and how we might deal with them. Almost mimicking the automated phone systems that are themselves a regular cause of wrath, recordings offer each participant a series of options and choices, gently prodding at the causes of our everyday frustration. Harrison, who I catch up with in the foyer of the Playhouse, describes The Rage Receptacle as a piece made for “accidental audiences”, those who might wander in off the street with a bit of spare time and curiosity. She speaks of the value of work that offers participants a pause, that gives us the opportunity to step out of our increasingly hectic lives and take a moment for contemplation.

At first glance, The Rage Receptacle seems like a fairly shallow investigation of a complex, knotty emotion, but in fact its unassuming simplicity is one of its greatest strengths. It’s more of an invitation than anything else, providing the questions and leaving the answers up to its audience. How often do we pause to consider our emotions, the stimulus they respond to, and how we choose to cope with them? The Rage Receptacle forms part of Harrison’s longer sequence of work The Grief Series, each of the seven segments exploring a different facet of bereavement in collaboration with different artists, but as much as all of those emotions are ever relevant, anger feels particularly timely. Still only in R&D at the festival, at an embryonic stage in its lifecycle, this particular piece offers up the promise of an intriguing evolution in response to its site and its “accidental audiences”.

One thing that Harrison draws my attention to during our conversation is the prevalence of site-based work in Leeds. This is a city where art happens on the street, where performances aren’t necessarily confined to theatres. Much of this is pragmatic; since the closure of the Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre, artists making work that falls outside the traditional remit of the city’s other theatres have found their projects essentially homeless. With what I’m told is a typical Leeds attitude of “let’s just bloody do it” – another woman I speak to has mounted projects including an underwater exhibition in a swimming pool, while Slung Low characterise their driving force as a “can do” approach – the work has embraced its enforced nomadic status, finding new temporary habitats around the city.

It’s from this large body of site-based work that Transform seems to take its cue. As festival producer Amy Letman explains to me on my first day, another of the areas that the Playhouse identified as a location they wanted to make work with and for was Burmantofts, a community just across the bridge from the theatre but one that the building has previously had little connection with. The piece emerging from this, Burmantofts Stories, takes place in the heart of this community, relating its narratives from within its own space. Drawn entirely from residents, the show is pieced together from the conversations and workshops initiated by theatremaker Pauline Mayers with people in the local area and is performed by seven of the participants.

Burmantofts is a community “mapped with voices” and held together by ritual. Hinting at ancient pagan ceremony and the age-old practice of telling stories around the campfire, the show’s arrangement seats audience members on benches forming a ring around the outdoor performance space, encircled by a string of fairy lights. In the piece itself, repeated, oddly graceful movements gesture to the reiteration of everyday activities, while the drinking of coffee – of particular importance to one of the men involved – is a core ritual bringing members of the community together. Through a careful use of sound, stories and songs drift in and out, sometimes overlapping, sometimes isolated. It can be messy, but no more so than life.

Alongside the narratives Mayers has gently teased out of participants – “I just love people,” she smiles as she describes the process of tirelessly hitting the streets and speaking to residents – her own story is quite extraordinary. With no real prior connection to the theatre, she first encountered Transform in the festival’s first year, when she won a free wristband on Twitter and dropped into Chris Goode’s Open House. By the end of the first day she was deeply embroiled in the process; two years later, Mayers is now an associate artist of Chris Goode & Company. Her interest, similarly to Goode, is in people and their stories; she describes this project as a way of “reframing the human condition”, reminding us that we all have stories worth telling.

Mirroring Mayers’ journey, Transform itself has seen a clear progression since its inception. Letman explains that in the first year the focus was on simply finding work to programme, while a year on the intention was to work more closely and collaboratively with the artists involved; now the circle of collaboration has widened even further, encompassing audiences and the city itself. One of the major impacts of this third festival is the possibility of those itinerant artists mentioned by Harrison finding a longer term home in the Playhouse, as new artistic director James Brining looks to bring various strands together into a varied but connected programme. The festival as an event is naturally exciting, its context inviting an intoxicating, transitory buzz. The real challenge is incorporating that ephemeral sense of artistic community into something wider and more permanent.

Author: Catherine Love-Smith