REWIND
Part of Pandemic Songs: a very strange year in the life of Unfolding Theatre.
Spoken by Luca Rutherford and Annie Rigby.
Let’s start with a check in
How are you feeling?
In your head, your heart and your body?
We could start way back, before Annie Rigby set up Unfolding Theatre, with her early experiences assisting director Alan Lyddiard as part of his Northern Stage Ensemble in Newcastle. It’s where she met Alex Elliott, who still works with Alan on occasion. And Alan still leads a permanent company, now in Leeds: the Performance Ensemble, a group of people all older than 60. From there we could talk about how Unfolding Theatre have operated effectively as an ensemble during this pandemic year, keeping Alex and the company’s other associate artists, Luca Rutherford and Garry Lydon, in work and creatively active.
Or we could start a little less far back: with Annie’s resistance to setting up a regular group – a youth theatre, for instance – because that kind of consistency or routine, aligned with the disruption of touring, “has been more than I could hold in my head”. Instead, Unfolding Theatre has demonstrated its commitment to building relationships with communities by: “meeting them, getting to know them, making something together, having an amazing time – and then saying bye and going off to the next community”. This erratic approach was particularly typical of the company before it became regularly funded as a National Portfolio Organisation, when intermittent project-by-project funding meant “we didn’t have that ability to keep coming back”.
Or we could start with a little boy, Leo, whom Unfolding Theatre first met when he was 10 months old, at the start of making Hold On Let Go. The company were leading a mark-making exercise and Leo’s mum photographed her baby’s scribble – his first! – because his dad had pledged to tattoo whatever it was on his arm. The company later returned to where Leo lives to share books and storytelling performances; there’s a book called Hooray for Fish that Leo – now aged three – loves so much that Luca has been sharing it with all the young children Unfolding Theatre encountered over the (first) pandemic year. Luca sees Leo as “our youngest collaborator: the only reason I’m sending out Hooray for Fish is because it made such an impact on him”. This relationship with Leo makes Luca – makes everyone in the company – think about rootedness, and the slow, slow ripples of working in community. Those ripples, says Luca, “come with time and come with depth”.
Let’s start with a check in
How are you feeling?
In your head, your heart and your body?
With her roots in ensemble and community performance-making, Annie has long been tempted to set up a regular participatory group. And at the same time: “I've always been very reluctant to have a youth theatre, or to have a regular group, because it means you can't go on tour for six weeks. Well, maybe you can, but it's been more than I could hold in my head, I think.” Even so, it’s been important to Unfolding Theatre to connect with – all kinds of people, of course – but also young people: and that’s how Right Now People was born. It was set up as a youth steering group for the company, meeting once a month, facilitated by Luca. “We met in a theatre, we had cheese toasties – it felt like a gang coming together,” Luca remembers.
When lockdown happened, rather than cancel the group, Right Now People decided to meet more frequently – every Monday evening in fact – something Luca, as a freelance artist working around the country, “would never have been able to commit to before”. In the crucible of lockdown, and all the stresses that’s brought, Right Now People has transformed in other ways. As the four young people grew to trust Luca and each other more, it “came to light that everyone in the group is neurodiverse: one member is autistic, another suffers a lot with anxiety,” says Luca. And so this weekly gathering has become focused on well-being: on creating a space in which those young people feel safe enough to be themselves.
Sometimes they think about the ways in which they might be creative selves: how they might make a podcast, for instance, or a short film; recently they published a short story written collectively. “But the majority of what we're doing is making a space that is rooted in all people feeling safe, for people who in other ways don't feel safe or don't feel fed. That's a massive learning curve for me,” Luca admits, “because I don't feel qualified to do that. However, I do feel qualified to listen.”
Let’s start with a check in
How are you feeling?
In your head, your heart and your body?
Right Now People “was set up to be a youth steering group for the company,” says Annie, “and it kind of is that, but it’s also a well-being space”. Through this dual purpose, it helps to orient the company around some fundamental questions: “What are these programmes for? And what are they for, for us?” There’s a benefit for the young people involved, clearly. But for the company, Right Now People also acts as “a window. We hear about a mental health crisis among young people – but when I hear Luca talk about Right Now People, I’m seeing those struggles directly through a small number of individuals.”
It’s only four people (just now, anyway): that’s not a lot, Luca acknowledges. But “the depth of that group, and what happens in that space” gets right to the heart of how she thinks about the work of making art. “Where is the art? Maybe the art is in creating a sense of belonging,” she suggests.
And the well-being the young people generate for each other nourishes Luca too. “There have been some weeks when I’ve felt: I don't want to run this session, I haven't got the energy. And then I've come to the session and about halfway through I’ll think: I'm so glad I'm here. That happens when I switch off a presenting version of myself.” When she enters the space, that is, not as artist or facilitator, but as a human among humans, “a being that contains multitudes”.
What about you though?
How are you feeling
In your head, your heart and your body?
Or we could start with another story from Annie: a half-remembered conversation that happened over a decade ago. The artist she was talking with remembers the conversation differently, which is why we're not naming them. Memory is a wily fox…
“The thing about artists,” Annie recalls this other person saying, “is we've all got a sliver of ice in our hearts. We form these relationships but we walk away: we take what we want from them, and then we move on.” Misremembered or not, the words stuck with Annie, because this is the dilemma at the heart of so many arts projects in communities, and something she feels quite mixed about.
“Not every project needs you to stick around,” she reflects. “Not every community wants you to stick around. But this period has pushed me to think: sometimes it's easier to walk away. Sometimes it's easier to do the lovely project and stop. But what we’re finding, because of the strangeness of this last year, and the decision to keep operating through this time, is a richness in these developed relationships.”
Right Now People is a space of weekly commitment, of repeated checking in with a small group of young people, of asking again and again: how are you feeling? And prioritising that over any other making. Luca knows it might be difficult to keep Right Now People running as a weekly group when the demands of her itinerant freelance work return. None the less, she says, “moving forward, Right Now People is still on a Monday evening. I’ve made that commitment in my bones.”
Press PLAY to find out more about the work that remained constant through the pandemic year.
Press STOP to find out more about the work that couldn’t happen.
Press PAUSE to find out more about the ongoing journey of B-Sides.
Press FAST FORWARD to find out more about where Unfolding Theatre are heading next.