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(PHONE RINGS)
(SECOND PHONE RINGS)
(THIRD PHONE TRILLS)
(FOURTH PHONE RINGS)
MAN: Listen to me.
I'm going to show you something you've never seen before.
I'm going to blow the whole thing...
to kingdom come.
(GUNSHOTS)
(UNSETTLING MUSIC)
Punchdrunk isn't really like any other theatre company.
You find yourself in another world.
It's dark, mysterious, it's sexy.
It's bloody.
It's a beast of a show.The epic and the intimate work really well.
I came out having had my mind blown.
The detail in the sets...
It's like jumping into the film.
You are your own movie director.
Punchdrunk is about falling backwards
with your hairs standing up on the back of your neck.
The sense of when a boxer is punched in the face,
and is in sort of a different time and place
before they hit the floor.
The starting point to every single project
is always the building as the beginning.
(DOOR CREAKS AND THUDS)
I will literally go in and let
the emotional architectural blueprint of the building guide me around.
From that comes a framework that you can sort of play into
if you let the building tell you what it wants to have performed inside it.
You can never, sort of, explore a building for a second time.
The response happens once and once only.
Over the years, we've used postal sorting offices,
we've used hotels,
we've used many office buildings.
Warehouses are, sort of, the defining ones.
I would say probably four-fifths of them...
are all demolished, gone.
There's something kind of beautiful
about that ephemeral nature to this work.
Oh, this is good.
Yeah. The, sort of, dominance of Mother Nature.
The natural world has literally started to invade.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
(MUSIC BECOMES INTENSE)
(SILENCE)
(DOOR LATCH CLUNKS)
(PEOPLE CHATTING)
It's an absolute pleasure to be meeting you all here.
I'm Felix. It's so nice to see you all.
I'm directing the show with Maxine.
Maxine. I'm directing the show with Felix.
I'll just quickly say that we did announce the show today.
ALL: Whoo!
'We knew this was the show we wanted to do in London.
'And, actually, what was amazing was finding Woolwich
'and not only finding one building, but two buildings,
'to tell the story of the fall of Troy.'
This is where your new home will be.
This is Greece. And that is Troy.
'It was such a unique, sort of, alignment of the stars
'that it was worth the wait.
'From a first walk-through of a building,
'it's then a minimum of nine months to a year,
'of a deep dive into the world of the show
'until we're anywhere near ready for opening night.
'Today we've about 100 people on site
'who are transforming these amazing old military munitions stores
'into a cityscape.
'We are actually building the walls
'of what will become antiquated streets,
'once the scenography is put on top in the months to come.'
This will be the main piazza,
uptown Troy, and that will become a department store.
This is our sake bar. Sorry.
This building here is Greece, the land of the victors.
This will all be vast, brutalist columns.
And then if you spin around, the other end of our abstracted cathedral
is going to be the shower block.
I think what's interesting is that in doing our first show
in, sort of, eight years in our hometown,
and actually finally being able to do a show in London
in a building that is not going to be demolished imminently,
as all the rest have,
it certainly has gone up in scale. But it is nerve-wracking.
(LIVELY PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)
Punchdrunk is entirely different
from anything that preceded it and has followed it.
The depth and the range
and the hugeness of the experience
means that they are, I think, in a completely different world.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING)
Punchdrunk created their own genre,
and I guess it's been called immersive theatre.
It's the inclusion of the audience member,
the participation, the deconstruction of the play.
They took it to a whole new level,
took theatre experience to a whole new level.
It is very hard to describe the show to someone
that has never been to a Punchdrunk show.
The performance happens around the building.
There is no stage. There is no elevation.
We are all in one space. The space is the stage.
It's an immersive experience, is not interactive.
So you just come in and you wear a mask.
The mask came about as a fix to a show that wasn't working
back when I was doing my finals at Exeter.
I was trying to figure out how to solve the problem
of distinguishing between performers and audience members
in a multi-space environment.
I thing Felix had a brilliant, brilliant epiphany idea
when he began putting audiences in a mask,
moving them around spaces freely,
and, most significantly, I think, giving audiences agency.
In Punchdrunk, everything's up for grabs, really.
There are a few ground rules.
You know, you're not meant to talk, you keep the mask on.
You obviously don't interfere with the actors.
And then beyond that, you're the star of the show
because you're wandering around and seeing things
and it's your perspective that defines what happens.
If you want to follow this person, follow this person.
If you want to watch the set, look at the set.
We're in a space like this right now
where there's so much information
that people can see, that they can touch.
So it's very different than watching from a chair.
I mean, I think if Punchdrunk is being true to its name,
it is trying to play around with disorientating audience
and making people feel slightly out of their comfort zone,
but it all being done in a way that actually leads them
to become very engaged with what's happening.
We're aiming to produce the physical response from the audience.
That's when we think we're giving them their money's worth,
to give them a tingle,
a shiver, maybe tears, maybe laughter.
You might take this as a sort of test of your personality,
whether you're a follower, or a seeker,
or somebody who waits.
But you can, by following a particular character,
trace the path around the whole of the building
and trace a path through the story.
(SINISTER MUSIC)
The mind is a maze, isn't it?
The mind is a dark, mysterious maze of winding streets
that are only seldomly lit by knowledge, experience,
ultimately, memory.
Memory lights our way through this dark maze.
And every time that I come back,
it's as though... the power is gone out...
as if I'm drowning in a pool of darkness, as if...
I'm dead.
With all of the mask shows that we have created,
there's always been a strong collection of source text,
so Sleep No More,
perhaps the show that we have become most known for,
is based on Shakespeare's Macbeth.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
The Masque Of The Red Death, we draw on Edgar Allan Poe's short stories.
The Firebird Ball was based on Romeo And Juliet,
a slightly lighter touch and feeling.
And then The Burnt City is based on, essentially,
two classic Greek tragedies:
Agamemnon by Aeschylus;
and Hecuba by Euripides.
And those two plays actually chart the same moment
of collapse of the legendary metropolis that was Troy.
There's a huge amount of planning
that goes into the pre-production part
of these large-scale mask works.
Felix and I, for The Burnt City,
we spent a long time in a room with lots of paper
working out character journeys through the space.
It starts as a big document on the wall that's scrawled on.
Down the side, it has each character, and across the top
it has the scenes 1 to 11.
And if you follow each character along,
you see each of these headings and you know in space
which room they are going to be in.
So, this is our master doc,
this is our loop charts.
And over the course of a three-hour show,
it's actually made up of a one-hour show
that loops three times.
This is the closest we get to a script.
Often there'll be gaps. As we get to the characters
that we know less about, then it becomes much more creative.
And sometimes, if I'm honest, it's...
You would just see: "In the bistro between seven and eight.
"Good luck. Find something interesting to do."
The point about Punchdrunk is it's never ceases.
There are stories going all the time,
but I think the main criticism is that people
often have a feeling that they've missed the main point.
And my response to that is there is no main point to Punchdrunk.
Everything is the point, so that it's a blizzard of detail
made up as our life is made up of tiny punches of experience.
(ENIGMATIC PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)
(MUSIC BECOMES UNNERVING)
# TOM HOWE & DAVID JONES: Spy Games
One of the amazing things about working on a show
is the group of people that make it. It really takes a village.
There's creativity exploding out of every scene.
With Punchdrunk shows you're creating a world that's not static.
And I think having that level of creativity and passion
means that the world is constantly alive and evolving.
I want to try.
When we're making a show like this,
just to walk around the building,
you'll overhear snatches of conversation
between people dissecting the meaning of a glance,
the minutiae of an interaction.
It's a thrilling thing to be a part of.
So, Peter Hall, I remember reading a biography of his many years ago,
and he said that 90% of good directing is casting.
And I went, "Ting."
That is absolutely where we come from in Punchdrunk.
Welcome to our collection of sick buddies; half museum, half maze.
(LAUGHTER)
Its wild in here, it really is. I'm Lily's mom.
(LAUGHTER)
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
(ENERGETIC DRUM MUSIC)
After the mask, the second big trademark
of Punchdrunk is the choreography.
Generally, in Punchdrunk shows the performers are dancers.
They have this incredible kind of dancers' physicality.
They look like, kind of, otherworldly figures
because they can do things with their bodies
that, you know, you and me can't do.
There's always been a beautiful synergy in dance
and visual art, I think, anyway.
And dance has been a very progressive art form
in terms of site and building.
You know, it's always been engaging spaces in a different way.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
Dance operates on a sometimes more poetic,
dreamlike landscape,
less easily defined and pinned down
than a dramatic text than word.
So I think this offered something
that suited the kind of world Felix was creating
with light, sound and set.
I love the beginnings of the process.
When we get the performers together in the studio,
we start to develop movement, ideas, actual material
in partnership with other people or solos.
It starts with improvisations and they roll and rumble on
until, before you realise it, you're actually
improvising a scene within the show.
I often start working more specifically on the finale.
We both like to feel like we know where we're going.
So I begin to create the steps and really try
and get a sense of nuance.
Maxine leads a lot of brilliant exercises
that kind of set up a common language across the whole company.
So it would be things like states of tension.
States of tension, essentially, it's about tempos
and speed and rhythm
and how we can use that as a performer to tell stories.
It ranges from one to seven,
from very low state of tension to an incredibly high state of tension.
And Max would offer us to use it within our work,
within our loop, and be, like, in this moment,
"What state do you think your character is?"
So rather than portraying it emotionally,
how can your physicality really show
how this person is feeling, or what the action is?
OK, let's try it from the same place, please.
I play Polydorus, the son of Hecuba.
And the state of tension has really been, like the framework
of this character.
It helps to go through the gears.
When I'm being drunk,
I'm in state to when he gets taken over by Chronos.
The movement quality is a bit more staccato.
There you go. That's it.
And then it feels like, again, this can have... Yeah, that's right.
Whereas when Polyduras dies and comes back as a Fury,
he's a bit more expansive.
The speed has, like, a cutting quality to it.
It's been nice to identify those different states
and try to find the root of them. Yeah.
# THE FIVE SUPERIORS: There's A Fool Born Every day
(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK)
As far as our set design and our world aesthetic goes,
for the major productions, for the masked shows,
we've always looked back to the past for our influences.
to sort of create a nostalgic, dream-world quality.
With Masque Of The Red Death, it was Edgar Allan Poe
and the turn of the century.
With the Drowned Man, it was 1960s Hollywood.
With Sleep No More it was 1930s Scotland.
This is the first time that we've looked forward to an imagined future.
The starting point is filmic references as much as anything else.
(ETHEREAL ELECTRONIC MUSIC)
In The Burnt City...
we looked a lot at Blade Runner.
It has that beautiful, Ridley Scott palette,
that sort of neon-drenched landscape.
And we looked to Metropolis.
(UNSETTLING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
They were key filmic sources for the aesthetic,
but, yeah, again, the atmosphere and territory we were in.
Metropolis as a source material also gives us a period of time
and a sort of socio-political starting point
on which to view the plays through.
It's almost like the key that unlocks the show.
(MELLOW AMBIENT MUSIC)
I think in the way that Punchdrunk approaches set design
is, you know, we sort of always discuss our method
as being part architecture, part interior design,
part fine-art installation.
It's all these things together because we're creating this world
that you can explore completely.
I guess with our installations,
a lot of them are sort of leaning into the abstract world of the show,
which is another really important element for us.
Felix always comes to us with the lens
through which he wants to tell the story.
So we have this sort of parallel future metropolis there.
In the instance of this show, not only are we doing Greece and Troy,
but the whole thing is set in the Underworld.
So, what's that layer, and how can we have those images or references
in our head as we're creating?
If you want to solve the riddles, the mystery box of the show,
every single room will have something
that reveals the fact we're in the Underworld.
If you're in the sake bar,
you might look at one of the bottles and realise
that it's not a Japanese rice wine.
It's actually water from one of the five rivers of the Underworld.
The majority of the audience won't ever look at that,
but the fact that it's there gives it an authenticity,
and it means that the one audience member
who does decide to read as much as he wants of what that bit of copy says
gets the reward of a bit of detail
that Bea's beautiful mind has solved for us.
(SLOW DRUMMING MUSIC)
One of my favourite spaces is the tenements.
That's a location that's pulled directly from the Underworld.
So the tenements represent Tartarus,
and the characters that were sent to Tartarus as their punishment.
So this is Salmoneus's room.
He was put in Tartarus
for impersonating Zeus.
So he was obsessed with trying to recreate thunder and lightning.
In our, kind of, interpretation of that story
he's obsessed with creating electricity,
but in this, sort of, intense, crazy way.
So, you can see that all the plug sockets are sort of fused together.
Shall we go down to the Danaides?
So, the story of the Danaides was that they were
50 sisters who were betrothed to 50 brothers.
And on the wedding night, 49 of them murdered their husbands.
The punishment was to fill up a bath eternally,
but it had a crack in it.
And this is our nice, yellowing tape technique,
which we've perfected over the last decade
to get just the right kind of yellow on our tape,
so it looks nice and old.
There's something, I think, interesting
that happens psychologically for the audience in a Punchdrunk show.
It's almost like a mindfulness exercise
to be surrounded by a world that is clearly physically real,
and you can pick up the objects and they are real objects.
And this is a real smell and this is a real taste
and this is a real touch.
But, you know, at any moment
that everything around you is a conscious, artistic decision;
you know it's not real.
And that's essential to produce this sense of wonder.
(HIP HOP MUSIC)
So, when we enter a building, it feels like a special day.
We have this thing called hide and seek.
All the performers are just let go in the space.
We are, in a way, to kind of have your own gut response to the space.
And then you can carry that through
to the rest of your creating of that character.
Felix and I and Cath really become, kind of, editors, actually.
It's like cooking a really rich banquet.
You know, you have all of these pots cooking at the same time,
and some pots needs a bit more love and attention and care,
and other pots, you can just leave them.
Gradually, you start to accumulate the show and the information.
(UNNERVING MUSIC)
As a performance practice within these works,
we work a lot with touch and partner work.
We like to try and create in an atmosphere where there's trust,
and then there's openness,
because ultimately in some scenes
we're seeking quite an intense level of sensuality.
And then there's all the work that we sort of did about, actually...
Yes, you're giving a massage, so you're seducing him,
you're giving him a sensation of pleasure,
but you're kind of breaking him down.
You're making him more vulnerable.
There's a materiality that is really nice.
If you don't have a real sense of play
and trust with each other as performers,
it's difficult to generate that kind of material.
(FOREBODING SOUNDSCAPE)
In Punchdrunk there is a real, sort of, sensuality
to the shows and to the interactions,
and I think it's, kind of, quite an unparalleled experience, really.
There's something quite siren-like
about the way the performers go about it.
You know, if they were boring, you'd ignore them.
But, of course, they're incredibly, sort of, alluring.
So, our massage feels very, kind of, sensual.
It gets sensual, and at the same time it can be aggressive.
Agh!
(DREAMY HARP CHORDS)
So, this sense of touch and intimacy is a feature of all of our work.
In The Drowned Man, the play of touch communicated stories
of passion and jealousy.
In Foust, we explored the seven deadly sins, one of which was lust.
It's a work that is driven by a character's pursuit of pleasure,
and part of this manifests itself as sexual desire.
I remember saying at the time,
Foust was one of the most important experiences in the country,
not just theatrically, but in the country, of all experiences,
which was as all Punchdrunk shows are,
not an adaptation of a legend, or a story,
but a response to it.
Foust was the first time working with the National Theatre,
and that was amazing.
This is fascinating because this is...
This felt like the moment
that we were starting to be accepted
outside of, like, the fringes of the fringe.
And it was extraordinary to be in the National's brochure.
And it shifted us through the gears of the scale of work we could make.
# BENNY GOODMAN AND HIS ORCHESTRA: Sing, Sing, Sing
One of the things that I've always loved about Punchdrunk
is our sense of ambition and drive.
And from pretty early on, we were really motivated
to create a work in the heart of New York City.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
The idea of pushing out and trying to find a new audience
in a new city was hugely exciting.
It was a new crowd to pull the rug of expectation away from
Sleep No More was due to open in New York, I think, for six weeks.
And those six weeks turned to six months,
and now it's 11 years on and still going strong.
The reason behind the success
is that simply there's nothing else like it.
And, certainly, when it arrived, there was nothing like it.
They created a new element within theatre
and people clearly love it.
It is of no surprise to me that it runs and runs and runs.
The most recent version of Sleep No More is playing in Shanghai.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
We had no idea, actually, whether it would work
in such a different cultural context...
..but we were really excited about the challenge,
especially because it was such a great opportunity
to collaborate with local Chinese designers
and dancers and producers.
In Shanghai, the audiences are absolutely extraordinary.
Within the first year, 100 Club had been organically set up
for people who'd seen the show 100 times.
We put in new characters, put in a whole new bit of narrative,
a whole new chunk of soundtrack.
We're constantly wanting to improve.
We never once say that it's complete
because there's always a pure... a depth of emotive power you can hit.
And maybe that's what drives us.
(UNSETTLING MUSIC)
Because our approach is so filmic, and it's always been the idea
of trying to put an audience inside a living movie,
we knew we wanted to try working on screen itself,
and see how you could break the rules of that form.
So it was incredible when we finally got there.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
The Third Day was about one man:
Jude law eventually getting trapped on island.
Felix had an idea and wanted to discuss it with me,
and said, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could have a television show
that would draw and lure an audience in
that would then become an interactive experience,
and somehow you would encourage your audience to visit...
the place, the town, the village, the island, whatever it may be,
within the drama.
It was to be a live festival,
a live event in the middle of...
..six episodes of TV.
The audience were welcome to join the island
and be a part of the festivities.
We then got caught up in the COVID pandemic.
We had to try and make it work,
and in many ways you could say it was almost more interesting
and more in keeping, in a way, with Punchdrunk's first foray into film.
We decided to, rather than have 5,000 audience on the island,
we would have one audience member, which was a roaming camera.
We would run the whole festival, as we were planning it,
with Jude performing nonstop.
And a single camera followed us around live for 12 hours,
so people could tune into the drama of my character's journey.
Basically, making a piece of slow cinema
and one continuous tracking shot that charted
from 9am to 9pm.
We really didn't have a clue as to what was going to happen on the day
because once we began,
there was no way of stopping it. It's almost like the train's going
and you just have to keep on pushing forwards.
It felt live and dangerous in a way
that none of us had anticipated.
I can't think of any experience I've had like it,
being in that world with them.
It was an interesting crossover between character and self
because physically there was such a demand on me,
and I have vivid memories of it.
And you have that from experiences on stage or being on a film set,
but they're very short. And there was an unusual,
eerie, sort of, lost quality to it that for a day I was someone else,
literally, physically experiencing what this person was experiencing
rather than myself, even though it was me, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think those 12 hours were incredibly compelling.
It was almost a new form of cinema, I think.
A theatrical form of cinema.
(FIREWORKS WHISTLE)
(JAZZY DOUBLE BASS)
And so as the audience, sort of, navigate these smaller pathways,
as you get closer to the instruction of show world,
there's a swell as the crescendo starts to build,
and then as you step in to Greece,
you're greeted by a wall of sound,
and the show begins.
(FOREBODING MUSIC)
Sound has become quite driving and leading force
within the palette of mediums we use in Punchdrunk.
It's very much about establishing these omnipresent,
tonal, layered, textural atmospheres
that fill every nook and cranny, every corner of the space.
(ANGELIC, CHORAL MUSIC)
In Punchdrunk sound is very important.
It's very rarely mechanically to do with sound effects.
It's do with a soundscape
that you sense rather than break off to attend to.
The sense of a storm gathering and then beginning to roar.
It's overwhelming.
So, we're here in Club. Scattered in this space
there are echoes of previous nights, previous deejays,
previous music that was played here,
All the while, Polymestor is keeping an eye on things
from behind a mirror.
And because these spaces are essentially, sort of, linked,
they do share a similar sound world.
We can carry on this way.
This is one of the corridors of the Love Hotel.
Again, omnipresent sound, which is just there
to, kind of, support and charge the space.
(INDUSTRIAL DRONING)
This is very much a sort of backstreet off the beaten path.
So, again, the sound is very... is very...
It's quite gritty, quite grainy,
distorted.
(FOREBODING TONES)
For the town, where we're stood now, will have much bigger scenes.
The sound blooms and explodes into the space,
not unlike a, sort of, big track in a club.
'It's always a treat to see how that affects an audience experience.'
(TECHNO DANCE MUSIC)
(MAN SHOUTING)
# RAY NOBLE: Close Your Eyes
In this world where everything is a couple of clicks away,
everything is too accessible.
You can live vicariously through your friends' Instagram.
So to have a real experience,
the likes of which no-one else will have had,
lives only in the retelling of it,
that feels like it's become more and more precious
over the past couple of decades.
What we've always been trying to do with every single experiment
be it a masked show, be it, like, an audio experience
is to fully empower the audience.
(SOPRANO SINGS ARIA)
The Borough was the 55-minute audio piece across the town of Aldeburgh,
and it was for one person at a time.
It was all about, kind of, theatricalising a town.
And if the work was landing for an audience member,
it would make them start to question
every single person they walked past.
Kabeiroi was a six-hour, living adventure
for two audience across the streets of London
where the inhabitants of a city become performers.
That kind of sense of transporting an audience
is at the heart of so much of the work.
We ask a lot of them, actually; we ask the audience to be live
and present in the moment with performers.
We ask our performers to be really live
and really present with the audience,
because often they have to shift the choreography
or shift the spacing, or the tempo or the rhythm.
We have some audience who purposely do things to affect us,
so we have to deal with that accordingly,
but it is really beautiful to have them in the space
and to see the story,
and we are affected by them.
The one-on-one element of a Punchdrunk show
is the most distilled example of an intimate experience
that an audience can have within this work.
There are scenes where you learn something about a performer,
a confession or a secret.
You can experience these, sort of, one-on-one moments.
Often a performer will beckon you aside.
What that adds to is the sense that you're having
a special one-off adventure,
that what you're seeing is not what everybody else is seeing.
You're just plunged into, like, that step further.
There's a feeling, while having watched from behind the mask,
that suddenly, with the mask taken off, that you're you.
And you're exposed and the performer can see you
and can see right into your eye.
No, they've never taken me aside. I don't know what it is.
It's so sad, it's like never being the person who's stopped at Customs.
In Punchdrunk we've always been really interested and excited
by the contrast between the intimate and the epic.
There's this possibility for an audience
to have a very solo experience.
But then if they want, they can find themselves
in this shared experience with many other audience.
So, we create, particularly, the, sort of, finale scenes,
these moments where we pull the audience together.
In The Drowned Man we had a finale scene
which was a line dance with, I think, 40 of the cast.
And the finale for The Burnt City was inspired
by a series of paintings actually called The Fall Of The Damned.
But this was the main inspiration from a Flemish artist,
and, essentially, the challenge
was to, sort of, create a moving version of this painting.
(INDUSTRIAL DRONING)
The finale is so crucial
because if you think about the crescendo of a night out,
of the theatrical experience,
what's that peak?
How does it both have a visceral impact
and an intellectual impact,
and how does it tie up with the entirety of what's gone before?
You need a finale point that draws everything together,
no matter who you've seen, who you've followed,
if you fail to find any characters, if you're only going to see this,
how does it feel conclusive and finite for you?
I think Felix and I actually from the beginning had thought
about this finale being as a kind of requiem.
It felt important to have a sort of point of view about loss
and mourning in this work.
You know, the winner, and the loser, and the invaders,
there isn't really any victor because everyone kind of loses.
So, these people that we've been following round the building
become, you know, symbols of loss and grief.
(INDUSTRIAL SOUNDSCAPE)
We really wanted this final scene
to have an emotional impact on the audience.
It was really important to us that this finale event
stayed with them long after they'd left the building.
(SIREN BLARES)
Having put on Sleep No More in other cities around the world,
it was always our intention to try and find
a future home for The Burnt City.
And we saw the most incredible space in LA.
It was crying out to have that show.
It's amazing and quite discombobulating
to be back in LA trying to get a show on in this most incredible building.
Do you want to go all the way up?
(FUNKY HIP HOP)
It's probably one of the most extraordinary buildings
that I've ever seen across all the years of space hunting.
And that's why, seven years on, we're still trying to land it.
Have all got this infrastructure in? Yes.
It's pretty much identical all six floors down.
Really?
Wow, this is crazy.
This is the main... This is the big ballroom.
This is going to be Clytemnestra's palace.
Whoa.
I wish Livi and Bea could see this
because this is good to go; move these out the way.
I just can't get over, the sort of, thickness of dust.
It's almost like a bad movie, isn't it?
It's like a straight-to-TV attic scene.
Ooh.
# DJANGO REINHARDT: Naguine
It's so weird. I was realising that probably
we're at a sort of turning point in our practice,
as this building's testament to, and, actually, the same with London,
how London took six years to get it on.
It's such a, sort of, slow form way of making work
that actually it's time for us to break that mould.
So, if we can finally get the show on here,
this will probably be the last full-site piece that we do.
It's amazing now the, sort of, theatrical vocabulary has shifted
and immersive work is really very accessible now,
and there's so many different types out there.
Which means it's going to have to shift.
My hunch is it's about incorporating tech
and it's about even more agency and autonomy for the audience.
If they're used to wandering round worlds, bearing witness,
which is, kind of, present-day immersive,
I think the future will be that there is a new term, a new word
where the audience are the lead protagonist in their own show.
You are the pivot, and if you don't move, the show pauses and waits.
And it goes when you go.
That I feel is the actual, sort of, crux
of the way the future's gonna go.
What excites me is the thought of making work
that no-one else has done.
I want to be able to plant my flag on the sand dune in the distance
that no one else can quite reach.
Because that's the thrill. If we can get out that far,
and we can bring some audience with us,
then I hope that the stories they'll have to tell when they get home
will be worth the journey.
# MARLENE DIETRICH: Where Have All The Flowers Gone?
# Where have all the flowers gone?
# Long time passing
# Where have all the flowers gone?
# Long time ago
# Where have all the flowers gone?
# Young girls pick them, every one... #
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