Hi Paul, good to chat!
Here’s a little pitch I put together for a project a few years back…
maybe a flavour of where I’m starting from.
An interactive cross-art-form show…
For an audience of 2…
Of all ages…
Set in your bed!
What IS it?
With Open Lab’s support, I would love to research and develop an artistically innovative show that blends music, puppetry, guided meditation, binaural soundscape, and headphone theatre in a brand new, pioneering way, to create a delicate tale of resilience, vulnerability, and hope.
The show is immersive. Listeners are both the audience and the story-tellers. Each listener presses play on their devices at the same time, and two separate synchronised audio tracks narratively and musically interweave; our story unfolds.
Your friend is a piece of toilet paper
But don’t hold that against them. After all, you made them!
Audience members alternate between puppeteering TWIST and becoming the traversable landscape, guided by their individual headphone tracks. Together, the three travellers share sun rises and sun sets (bedside light on/off), encounter mountain ranges (raised knees), vast seas (folded blankets), terrifying earthquakes (sharp diaphragmatic breaths), and guiding winds (from the mouth, actually).
TWIST never speaks - music carries the emotional weight of the story, and guides all three participants… but to where? TWIST is lost. What is it seeking? Why is it alone? It’s up to you to hold, heal, and help TWIST get back home.
Why THIS style, why THIS story, and why NOW ?
This pandemic is no joke. We are fed current affairs through partisan echo chambers, fuelling anxiety and polarisation. We see reality through a shattered prism, and we’re all isolated in our own fragment.
We need a shift. Things must be re-framed. And this innovative style of story-telling gives us the safety, the space and the opportunity to practice exactly that. From the comfort of your own home and with loved ones of any age, this free, accessible, immersive show will literally make you see the world differently. For the vast majority, this will be their first ever encounter with multi-art-form theatre outside of a venue. The form, the story, and the overall experience are therefore united in harnessing and subverting the limitations of lock-down. I don’t want to deny any of our struggles, but instead to empower each of us to look directly at them, without fear.
TWIST
’s story is an allegory for how it feels to grapple with ourselves and with loss. I was raised by my grandparents, and my Gramp’s recent death is, without doubt, at the forefront my creative output. I think of my Nan - the bravest person I know - losing her husband of 67 years, and her quiet, resilient strength. She is incredible, but not unique - we all have this within us. My personal struggles with various severe learning disabilities and my experiences with organisations like
and The British Paralympic Team are also at the heart of this piece. Yet I hope it can resonate with audiences in many ways, as a metaphor for finding freedom or peace, through global struggles as well as their own personal battles.
Finally, this unique combination of story and style can tackle all of these heavy issues whilst feeling playful, cathartic, and celebratory. People deserve vibrant, joyous experiences from The Arts. This show is an outreach tool, and through it we can recognise our own capacity to find reserves of empathy, wonder, and hope for the days ahead. A show like this could not be more timely.
What happens AFTER ?
I would love to maximise social engagement and audience access to this project, so I intend to release this show for free across all music platforms. Additionally, listeners will be encouraged to re-unite their TWISTs with the rest of its tribe via social media. I envisage an international community owning, presenting, and celebrating their unique TWISTs: a huge potential for social engagement. This uplifting creative legacy would be a beacon of connection and help amplify the show’s message of unity and wonder long after TWIST’s journey is complete.
Importantly, a piece of the show will always remain with each listener – their own TWIST!
Now, Open Lab would help me develop not only a new show, but also a brand new theatrical language. I would aim to complete this project within the year and then, under Open Lab’s guidance (and hopefully with the support of The Barbican’s Creative Learning Team) I would engage other creatives, educators, and councillors using this nuanced form and style. A few ideas include:
Implementing TWIST as an educational tool for teachers and parents alike, focusing on National Curriculum subjects for people with additional educational needs. Each UK region would have its own bespoke version, voiced by actors from that area.
Engaging TWIST more directly as a wellbeing tool for councillors to help younger people process abuse and bereavement, and equip older people to deal with loneliness and anxiety.
Expanding this already highly tactile show into a story-telling tool created specifically for people with visual impairment.
Equipped with what I would learn through
Open Lab, I’d also love to collaborate with creatives on:
A treatment of this incredible story by Jorge Borges. This naturally lends itself to yoga nidra (an ancient de-stressing technique, guiding you to a state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping) with an immersive audio series, placing you somewhere between listener and protagonist, taking place over a number of nights.
A perpetual motion show, where an audience listens to a single track in staggered intervals - effectively a musical cannon. They follow a physical path, and their protagonist is the audience member in front of them, and their protagonist is the audience member in front of them, and their protagonist is… You get the idea. The Barbican building would be a fantastic space for this particular project - just sayin’.
Why OPEN LAB ?
I did an actual fist pump when I saw this year’s Open Lab brief.
I created my first piece of headphone theatre eight years ago. This cross-art-form style has been percolating in my mind ever since - how best can we navigate these nuanced worlds? The work championed by The Barbican including The Encounter, Kiss & Cry Collective, and Cheek By Jowl’s repertoire are all incredibly inspiring. I believe that The Barbican is the most progressive organisation for this kind of innovative exploration, so Open Lab’s mentoring, development sessions, and overall insight would be truly invaluable for this show and for myself.
Some IDEAS
Here are two draft ideas I’ve made for this Open Lab submission. Grab some headphones and sit comfortably - you are about to be guided through some of the potential narrative experiences of the show.
Pillow Drum
An ASMR/binaural-music story-beat, merging sounds created by the listener with the headphone story track. This rhythmic motif could be part of TWIST’s native language, and an ongoing theme throughout its journey - the Call of Discovery.
Ocean Breath
A potential music/meditation story-beat. After a terrible storm, TWIST floats on a calm ocean - your belly. Waves rise and fall, almost as if they’re being breathed, which of course they are, by you and your partner.
Who AM I?
Ah yes.
So I’m a multi-instrumentalist, an actor, a composer, and I try my best to live in a world where these paths collide. I’ve been really lucky and worked with some great theatre companies including The NT, The RSC, Complicité, and Vienna’s National Theatre, The Burghteater in all of the above roles, and with Sony ATV as a songwriter and music producer. There’s a much fuller list of my credits, awards and residencies on my CVs, and you can find a good cross-section of my work throughout this site. But broadly speaking, I’m most excited to make work that is brave, blurs the line between forms, and pushes it all to a new level.
And I’ve taken up gardening and paragliding over lockdown.
I’d love to be a part of Open Lab, so if you have any thoughts or questions, big or small, please get in touch!
