Theatre and Dance Previews

Laura Halliwell and Fenella Lee

The Big Spring Project: What’s it all about?!

Imagine starting a project with a basic theme, a group of adults and children from the local community, and the proverbial blank canvas. i.e. no real idea where you're going to end up!

Well that's exactly what Trestle, St Albans’ resident professional theatre and arts organisation, are doing with The Big Spring Project - a creative community activity that is set to celebrate the cultural diversity of St Albans. 

Following the success of last year's event, The Big Spring Project 2007 will take place between January and March 2007, bringing together local people of all ages from a range of cultural backgrounds and will be led by a professional creative team from Trestle.

They hope that after three months of weekly workshops they will have some sort of performance plus an interactive exhibition – but they honestly don’t know what it will be!

The job of co-directors Laura Halliwell and Fenella Lee is to turn these workshops into something.

In a nutshell, what’s The Big Spring Project?

Laura: The Big Spring project is basically about Trestle connecting with local people of all different ages and backgrounds and bringing them together with creative professionals to participate in an arts project which takes place over 12 weeks. That’s it in a nutshell!

So what will they be doing?

Laura: We hope that this year’s project is going to lead to a kind of installation at the end of March. Our theatre space will be completely transformed into another new and interesting environment for the general public to enter into. But throughout the process of the project we’ll be covering things like drama, music and design.

Fenella: To give you an idea last year we did a project that resulted in a performance called 'Left Luggage'. When we started the project in January 2006 we didn’t have any idea what the end product would be but we worked weekly in workshops with our participants, who were all of a mixed age, and devised, improvised and created this performance which they delivered at the end of March.

So we’re hoping that a similar thing will happen. We will meet weekly and organically produce something that will perhaps be more of an installation rather than only a performance, so that during the day people can come along and actually experience whatever is in the studio theatre, almost like an interactive museum exhibition.

The theme that we’ve looked at is food. The group that we’re working with is a very diverse mix from the community so they will be able to offer a varied range of foods from their particular cultures.

Laura: And all the stories, recipes, traditions and customs that go along with food will provide us with rich source material and that literally is just a starting point. The project could go off in all number of directions and I’m sure it will once we get working on it because the ideas come as much from the participants as from us.

So will it just be an exhibition or will there be performances as well?

Laura: I think our aim is to create this transformed space so that people can experience it without seeing the performance within it, but that at certain times a performance will happen in there. You will have a choice as to whether you see the space come alive with actors or members of the community performing, or whether you see it as an exhibition, so it will work on two levels hopefully.

So you’ve started off with basically a complete blank canvas and then recruited people?

Fenella: Yes we’re working with a group of about 20 Year 5 children from Camp School and we’ve tried to source adults from the local community. We’ve gone along and talked to different weekly clubs to see if they would be interested in working with other people who they would never think of meeting or working with normally. The hope is that there will be this link in the community, not only with the different people and ages working together, but with Trestle so that they know that this space is here and it can be used for everybody in the community.

What sort of age range is it?

Laura: The children are aged nine and ten and our adult participants range up to people in their 70s and possibly their 80s. Hopefully people will bring their different experiences of life and different opinions and viewpoints to the table.

So are you just asking them to bring their experiences of life with them or do they need any special skills – art, drama etc?

Laura: No we’ve made the project open to anyone who’s interested really. That was the only criteria, that they were enthusiastic about coming along to take part in a creative activity on a weekly basis. I’m sure that they do all have lots of skills that we’ll discover, that they probably wouldn’t necessarily shout about, but we’ll find out about them and make use of them. Hopefully it will be a learning process for everyone – they’ll teach us things and we’ll offer them our skills as well.

So you’ve got a group of people of all ages and the basic theme of food. Then they all come together for the first time to create something, so what do you do?

Fenella: This week we’ve started brainstorming and working out exactly what we’ll be doing when we meet them for the first time, along with our creative professional team. We’ll probably have a couple of sessions where we’ll be working with the groups individually and after a couple of weeks we will try and integrate them. We don’t have any firm ideas of exactly how we’ll do that but last year we got them to write to each other. So that’s an idea but I guess with our theme of food we’re thinking that we might have them writing on plates or designing plates. So there’s going to be a lot of off the wall ideas and a lot of different ways of approaching the theme.

Laura: Yes. Then maybe we’ll do things from a drama point of view one week and a design point of view another week and all of those things will throw up new ideas. Then each week you end up with more and more ideas and it’s really our task to keep shaping and shaping them so that by the end of the project we’ve got that final grand idea.

Fenella: We’ve got a professional designer on the project so a lot of our workshops might be design led, given that our idea is that the end result might be more of an installation and that our studio theatre will hopefully be totally transformed into a different world.

We don’t have any fixed ideas of what it will be. If we’ve had any fixed ideas in the past then they’ve always been thrown out of the window once we’ve met the participants and they’ve put their own stamp on the project but that’s exactly what it’s all about - that they have ownership of it. We just try and make their ideas possible.

So after each session your job is to try and form it into something that can go towards the final thing?

Fenella: This is the third project that Laura and I have done and we always find that there’s loads, far too much stuff, and our job is to edit it down.

Laura: Yes. We work very much as a team, so the two performers that we’re working with and Fenella and I will come together and based on what’s happened one week, we will plan how that might move forward in the next session. Or perhaps a story that’s come up in a workshop will spark off another idea for another exercise or it might encourage the performers to do an improvisation. All the ideas get used in different ways. Things do creep in and filter through and you suddenly find that perhaps something that somebody said in week one ends up being said in the show.

So it’s a constantly evolving thing rather than people doing workshops and then getting to a certain cut off point and thinking “right - now we’ve got to put something together?” I can see it being hours long!

Laura: You do have to be strict with yourself when you get towards the final weeks. You have to say “OK we’ve created a lot, so let’s polish what we’ve got or structure it more, and that’s how devising works I think. A lot of devised theatre always has lots of ideas and it’s really the job of the director to say “OK we’ve got plenty – let’s make this into something”.

So from a performance point of view are you likely to have a story at the end or bits of different scenarios?

Fenella: It’s difficult to say at this point. I remember last year a lot of our participants said they really wanted to be involved in the project but didn’t know what they were supposed to do. I do understand that whole frustration of not understanding it, but the workshops can stand alone in one way even though we are sort of working towards a final thing.

What’s happened in the past is that our professional performers have perhaps worked on particular characters which our participants may connect with but it’s difficult to know whether there will be a linear story there, or whether it will be a different selection of scenes and they all have a particular theme that links them all. We don’t have any firm structure to how that will work, we’ll just go with the flow.

Laura: We’re really lucky to have two really inventive and imaginative performers
on board and that’s really crucial - to have people that are really up for devising and are happy to just create material.

Fenella: And not be working from a script! There probably will be some scripted from improvisation I would imagine, but no fixed script in any way, shape or form.

It sounds really exciting starting with a blank page and seeing where it takes you?

Laura: I think devising can be one of the most satisfying, enjoyable forms of theatre and it can also be one of the most frustrating and soul destroying if it doesn’t go right. So I think it definitely is about coming in with that spirit of trying things and saying yes to ideas and having that team of people that is prepared to get up and do that and not throw things out before you’ve tried them. It’s very important to have a team of people who are up for doing that.

And it’s our job to take them through that process and have them enjoy it as well as much as us. It’s not all about US sitting in a room having fun all day.

Fenella: Absolutely. It’s not about that final production week it’s really very much about the 10 or 12 weeks that the participants have been coming along. They’ve made such wonderful friends and explored so many different mediums so it really is about the process and not necessarily about the final piece.

And it must be satisfying for you two as well?

Laura: It’s such a lovely project to work on. After last year’s project I can honestly say that it was the best experience I’d had in my whole time working. It was just amazing to meet so many wonderful people from the community. They were so up for it and were prepared to be playful even if they were 85 - it was just such a lovely experience to have.

So when will the final installation / performance be?

Laura: That will be in the week beginning the 26th March 2007 and we’re hoping that the whole thing will be open for the week. Within that week there might be a number of performances that take place within the space but the space can still be entered into, even if you just pop in for a cup of tea and want to explore it.