Gwilym Lawrence, Director of The Other City
We’ve just launched The Other City, a new piece of audio theatre that audience members can listen to via headphones at any time they choose, in any city in the world.
We worked on the show on and off for around two years, and during the testing stages many audience members said they found the experience to be very mindful. This response really pleased us. The Other City, we hope,opens up an invitation to explore urban spaces in unfamiliar ways, to stop and notice things you wouldn’t normally and to think about the global forces that shape our immediate surroundings.
One recurring idea in the show is that we aren’t, as human beings, meant to live in cities. As the tweet above from Matt Haig neatly sums up, our bodies and brains aren’t kitted out to cope with the enormous amount of stimuli we subject them to every day, just by walking down a busy high street. Without even noticing we’re doing it, we develop techniques to shut out a lot of what’s going on around us. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of noticing a substantial change near where we live – a building gets demolished or changes colour – and we seem to have no recollection of what was there before. Where I live in Sheffield, there have been huge architectural changes recently; the city’s silhouette feels like it’s constantly shifting, with new flats and tower-blocks appearing like mushrooms overnight. Just recently, the iconic Grosvenor House Hotel was demolished, leaving the sky looking starkly naked.
One thing I’m particularly excited about with this show is the way it plays with scale, inviting you to notice the minutiae of your city as well as the big, sweeping changes: a small fissure in a stretch of tarmac, the way the light catches a particular tree, the reflection of the sky in a tower-block window. One audience member said that whilst experiencing the show, they had the pleasurable sensation of being a tourist on their own doorstep, seeing it in strange new ways. Through this kind of interaction with our lived environments, we can come to see and understand them differently. More broadly, the show is being released as the Brexit drama appears to be reaching its endgame; a time at which we’re all thinking out loud about the movement of people and ideas, and ultimately about our place in the world. In the midst of all this, I hope audience members for The Other City in Newcastle, Sheffield and beyond enjoy this opportunity to experience their city afresh, and to consider the ways in which it might be an arena in which both local and global forces play out.
Check out Matt Haig’s excellent book Notes on a Nervous Planet.
- What is ‘The Other City?’
The Other City is a piece of audio theatre in the form of a podcast. You listen to it through headphones while moving around a city.
- Can I listen to it at home, in the car or on the bus/train/ferry?
Technically, yes. But ideally you should listen to it outside in an urban environment.
- So not in a rural or suburban area?
Members of the creative team have experienced the show while walking in quiet streets and it still works, but somewhere busier is better. We made the show in collaboration with a researcher who looks at how global and local things come together specifically in cities, so it’s designed to be experienced in a city.
- Any particular city you had in mind?
Not at all. You can experience the show anywhere in the world. And we’d love to know where The Other City has been listened to, so please get in touch afterwards and tell us where you are using #TheOtherCity on social media.
- Where do I have to go?
The show can be started absolutely anywhere you like. During the podcast itself, where you go is totally up to you.
• What sort of experience is The Other City?
The show is quite relaxed and asks you to think and reflect. You won’t need to run anywhere! Some people have said they found it mindful.
- How long will it take me?
From start to finish it should take you between 45 and 60 minutes.
- Do I have to do it by myself?
Again, that’s up to you but we’d recommend it as in individual experience. That said, we have held events where groups of people start in the same place and then come back together again at the end to share their experience, which worked very well.
- Where can I download ‘The Other City’?
‘The Other City’ is available through all major podcast providers. See www.theothercity.co.uk for details.
• What are the events in Newcastle & Sheffield?
In April we are holding special meet the team events at Alphabetti Theatre in Newcastle (6th April) and at Theatre Deli in Sheffield (13th April). Here you can come and do the show from 2-3pm then return to the theatre and meet members of the creative team plus other people who have just done the show. We’d love to meet you there.
On 2nd April we’ll launch our brand new show The Other City. Rather than being live theatre the show is a podcast that you can listen to while walking around any city.
Photos by: www.phyllischristopher.com
Cap-a-Pie have never done a show that’s purely audio before. However, something that was solely listened to rather than watched really fit the themes of what we, and our collaborator Dr Matt Davies were exploring.
Matt works at Newcastle University and looks at how the global and the local come together in urban environments. Primarily Matt is researching Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the effects that world events like the Football World Cup and the Olympics have on local communities. In Rio the effects are quite stark, eg. an entire favela is bulldozed to make way for an Olympic village.
The aim of our project was for people to think about their own city and how the world outside influences and shapes it. We decided that if we wanted to provoke people to think about that, it would be best for them to experience the show while being outside in the city.
One of the brilliant things about this piece is that once launched it will be available for download, for free, anywhere by anyone at anytime.
We also love the intimacy that the show has. In The Other City you’ll be walking around by yourself, headphones on, and being spoken to directly by our main character. It’s a show that asks you to think (but in a fun way) and the intimate experience really helps this along.
So while The Other City is a slight departure from what you might expect from us, it’s one we’re really excited about having people listen to all over the world.
Find out more about The Other City.
Sign up to be one of the first the visit The Other City.
This could be an accurate descriptor for what is happening in the world right now. But it will also be the working title for the new show that we’ll be making in early 2019 (more on where that title came from later on).
For some time now, we’ve been wanting to do a project around climate change. It’s one of the biggest issues of our time and feels particularly relevant at the moment when experts are telling us that the clock is ticking to do something about it.
In the past year or so we’ve also been forging relationships with climate scientists and engineers at Newcastle University and this year an opportunity arose with the Royal Academy if Engineering to create a brand new engagement project.
Our pitch was to make the beginnings of a piece of theatre about climate change, that was inspired and created by primary school children, with help from climate scientists and performed by professional actors for an audience of all ages.
Climate change will affect us all, but it’s the younger generation who will bear the brunt and we felt that it would be interesting and useful to get their perspectives and to broaden their understanding of climate science and the engineering solutions from people with real expertise.
After our successful funding application to the Royal Academy of Engineering Ingenious scheme, we got the ball rolling on the project by facilitating a couple of short sessions with two classes at Hotspur Primary School in Heaton. We wanted to gauge their knowledge about climate change as well as setting them a couple of creative tasks. One of those tasks was to come up the title for the piece mentioned at the very top. ‘Climate Change Catastrophe’ won the day but it was a close run thing with other contenders including ‘The Sunbeam Situation’ and ‘Don’t Do Climate Change’.
The project really kicks off in January 2019 when we get the students, the scientists and engineers, the actors and Cap-a-Pie all in a room to start creating.
Can’t wait.
Interview with Professor Owen Davies, University of Hertfordshire on creating The Important Man
September 24th, 2018
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What do you research and why did you want to create a piece of theatre from it?
I work broadly on the history of witchcraft, magic, ghosts, popular medicine, and the supernatural over the last few hundred years. This has included exploring urban and rural fortune-tellers and their clients, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I began to refocus my attention on the popularity of fortune-tellers during the First World War due to be being involved in running the University’s Everyday Lives in War Engagement Centre. I was interested in the opportunity to create a piece of theatre out of this research for two reasons. First, I had already worked with the theatre company Out of Joint to inform the creation of a play about Jane Wenham, of Hertfordshire, who, in 1712, was the last person to be found guilty of witchcraft in England. I had much enjoyed working with the actors, playwright, and director, so I thought working with Cap-a-Pie would be an equally stimulating and enjoyable creative opportunity. And it has been.
What excited you most about The Important Man and what were the challenges?
The world of fortune-tellers and prophets during the First World War is full of potential for drama and comedy, and I hoped that the depiction of this unusual facet of everyday life on the Home Front in the form of a play, would better bring home to people the complex relationship between anxiety and faith in a time of war. The play also explores interesting ideas around the boundaries between science and the supernatural, at a time when spiritualism was popular, and electricity was still a novel force for many people. As the historical advisor, I guess the main challenge was to identify the sort of source materials and objects that might give Cap-a-Pie a real feel for the period and the diverse characters who operated as fortune tellers and prophets. Just giving a load of academic books and articles to a creative team whose time is limited, who need to work fast and intensively to generate narrative and dialogue that give a genuine feel for time and place, is not particularly helpful.
Has creating the show made you think any differently about your research?
Yes, in several ways. I consider writing history as a creative exercise in blending narrative, analysis, and illustrative examples. Working with Cap-a-Pie made me think about how the process of writing for a different medium, a play, can inform the way I approach writing history for a general reader. Every time I was working with Cap-a-Pie we were thinking about the audience and how you can tell a complex story as simply as possible. That is a really valuable exercise. The questions the Cap-a-Pie team asked about the personality and motive of the characters in the play also made me reflect on how I understand the real people that inspired the fictional creations. I am always learning from other disciplines and people with different approaches to presenting history.
What was your process for directing The Important Man?
This process has been very organic. My role has included a combination of dramaturgical input, and sowing seeds for further practical discovery. As a theatre maker, Brad [performer] is a power station of ideas, with the performance skills to support them. And with Katy’s [producer] vision and killer management skills, my job becomes just a joy.
My role has been very much to reflect back to him the impact of each character or narrative slant and to help to fine tune the piece as we head towards production.
What excited you most about the show and what were the challenges?
Are you joking?! Fortune tellers? World War 1? What is NOT exciting about that?!
No, really, I am always really keen to work with Cap-a-Pie. Katy and Brad are a fantastic team. I love that often their work centres around communicating areas of incredible expertise such as, in this case the research of Professor Owen Davies (a real-life Professor of magic!). I came into the project part way through and I loved the work that (previous director) Gwilym had already done, and it was exciting to springboard from there.
The role that ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ had to play in the everyday world during the Great War is just fascinating, lending a sense of reason to life and to the unfortunately inevitable death of so many. At a time when the scientific world was negotiating its own role, innovations like electricity and photography were as unfathomable and inexplicable as the world of the occult. So why wouldn’t fortune tellers be viewed as reliable sources of information? As we found out more, it threw up bigger very current questions for me about where we place our faith and why.
The challenges are that there is so much ground that we would like to cover. It feels important that we don’t dilute the piece by attempting to tell every story.
What is your favourite part of the show and why?
Well of course I love all of it. But I think a combination of Calderon telling us about the little homing pigeon and the young soldier who we meet are the moments which touch me the most. I could watch Brad playing these again and again. I also love the title, which offers a continued provocation, an invitation to consider who exactly is being referred to, and by whom. The absence of female perspective is also a comment on the times and I will be interested to hear from an audience about their interpretations of our choices.
Oh, and the magic opening of the suitcase makes me belly-laugh. I’m entertained by how eager I am to buy into even the most (close your ears Brad) cod magic trick! We can’t wait to show you.
We created The Important Man over several stages. The first was an initial research and development period. We created a lot of material, stories and characters and figured out the world of the play. Out of that period came a 15 minute piece of theatre.
The second stage was a more concentrated period of time and was where we really fleshed out the story. We used lots of improvisation and then shaped the story and the script as we went along.
The third stage was about making tweaks and changes to the show, strengthening the story, shaping the play into a final draft.
We were incredibly lucky to work with Professor Owen Davies from University of Hertfordshire, who is an expert in magic and fortune-telling. Owen was present throughout this process, from initial conversations about the kind of material we were interested in to him watching sections of the show and giving feedback, advice and ideas related to the historical content. He was also incredibly helpful for simply checking facts to maintain the accuracy and authenticity of the piece. And having someone so knowledgeable in the rehearsal room means it’s a very efficient way of working
Myself and Katy at Cap-a-Pie were very pleased to be joined by a brilliant creative team to create The Important Man. Director Laura Lindow is a very experienced director, deviser, writer and performer. She has a fantastic sense of what makes a strong story and what audiences want from characters. Designer Imogen Cloët created a visually striking set that was easy to tour with. She works in a very detailed way which really suited the piece.
I’ll be performing The Important Man this autumn. Find out more here.
Professor Chris Gerrard, Department of Archaeology, and Richard Annis, Archaeological Services, Durham University on Woven Bones and the Scottish Soldiers
May 31st, 2018
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This year Durham University’s Department of Archaeology is working with a local theatre company Cap-a-Pie to create a new show – Woven Bones. The show is based on the story of Scottish soldiers who were taken prisoner after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650.
The Scottish soldiers project grew from a discovery of human remains during construction work on Durham’s UNESCO World Heritage Site. The remains of 28 young men were found in two mass graves at Durham University’s Palace Green Library. Painstaking excavation and analysis revealed that they were some of more than 1600 men who died in captivity after the Civil War Battle of Dunbar in September 1650.
These were ordinary people who had been caught up in extraordinary events. Many would have been recent recruits to the Scottish army, young men taken from day-to-day life to fight invading Parliamentary forces. Their first experience of battle was a disastrous defeat. Lasting under an hour, the Battle of Dunbar was one of the most brutal, bloody and short battles of the 17thCentury civil wars.
North News and Pictures
Reports from the time suggest that anything between 300-5,000 soldiers died at the battle with a further 6,000 captured. It is thought that 1,000 sick and wounded soldiers were released, while approximately 4,000 endured an eight-day forced march to Durham, where they were imprisoned in the then-disused Cathedral church. Many died of malnutrition, disease and cold whilst in Durham. Their bodies were buried, hastily and without ceremony, in an obscure corner nearby.
This was the story of those men whose remains we found in November 2013. But the Scottish Soldiers Archaeology Project Team has found out much more about the people who had died at Durham and about their fellow prisoners who survived. Some of those men were sent far from home; 150 Scots went to New England as indentured servants. After seven years of working in the woods and ironworks of Massachusetts and Maine, they were free to make new lives in a new world.
One chaotic and terrifying hour of battle changed the lives of thousands. The road from Dunbar led some to unmarked graves in Durham and others to lives on the edge of the known world.
Talks, news reports and interviews undertaken by the Durham University research team have drawn strong reactions to this extraordinary story. The chance to tell it in a different way, to put a very direct and very human interpretation on the research results, is why the team were keen to work with Cap-a-Pie. Thousands of prisoners, five archaeologists, three actors; one fascinating story.
Cap-a-Pie will present Laura Lindow’s play Woven Bones at venues between Dunbar and Durham in June and July. After each performance members of the archaeology team will be taking part in a post-show discussion and Q&A. We hope to meet you at one of the performances.
On a drizzly Tuesday afternoon the Cap-a-Pie team took the train to Durham. Welcomed into Durham University’s Department of Archaeology we were given an incredible opportunity: a full tour of the human bioarchaeology laboratory and the chance to lay out a skeleton of our own in the pattern of the identification process of the Scottish Soldiers. These weren’t the skeletons of the Scottish Soldiers but others who are part of other research projects being conducted at Durham University. The visit was so we could better understand the archaeology and the science behind the story of the Scottish Soldiers.
We entered the room to find the dry yellow bones/bone fragments laid out with care across the benches. The room was warm and bright, busy but neat. I was reminded of the much loved plastic skeleton in the Biology department at school (Bob) who used to disappear and reappear in ever more unlikely places (the locker room / the roof / the garden) but that complete and anatomically precise cast didn’t come close to the weathered shards on the cushioned table top.
Dr Anwen Caffell of Durham University with some of the remains of the Scottish Soldiers. Credit: Durham University / North News and Pictures.
I’m not a squeamish person, I’m reasonably robust about the ins and outs of the body, and there was nothing gory in what we were looking at. But it was somewhere after the cast of the newborn baby skeleton and just before the detailed discussion of the way abscesses burrow through the jaw bone that my vision began to dim and a gradual, persistent wave of nausea started to build in my body. I realised I was on the verge of passing out and had to sit down with my head between my legs.
For me this was the most surprising thing of the afternoon: the instinctual connection I felt with the bodies (because that’s how I realised I was thinking of them, as bodies not skeletons specifically) and my own sudden awareness of the very real writing of injury, disease and poverty on the human body. Lives so hard and so brief that the pain is written into the skeleton itself.
And that’s what we need to capture in the design: an appropriate and respectful language which can speak not just about the short painful lives of the soldiers themselves, but also about the emotional impact of the dig; reading the story of these men and boys from their final remains. The archaeologists at Durham University are deeply respectful in their work, extending to a firmly worded sign on the door reminding students of the respect due to human remains. It is incredibly moving to see the curved leg bone of a child with rickets, the deep painful cavity a young man had to live with, or the spongey bone texture of a weak and malnourished body: there is so much story in the skeleton alone.
North News & Pictures
Last week we concluded our first two weeks in the rehearsal room for our brand new production ‘Woven Bones’. We spent the fortnight devising with three actors and writer Laura Lindow, around the stories of the Scottish prisoners of war from the 17th century Battle of Dunbar whose bones were found buried in Durham in 2013. On hand to help were also academics from Durham University’s Department of Archaeology who conducted the analysis of the skeletons and uncovered their stories.
We’ve worked with academics many times in the past and there are two things that really stand out for me about working in this way:
- Having such specific expertise plugged into the work in real-time. After we show a researcher something we’ve made or complete an improvisation, they can suggest tweaks to better align the theatre with the research which in turn can have incredibly useful outcomes for character and story.
The process here was slightly different in that the Scottish Soldiers Archaeology Project has a small team of researchers attached to it so we were visited by four academics during our time in the rehearsal room, as opposed to just one in previous projects. Each had their own specific knowledge and were never without some kind of considered and knowledgeable answer to our myriad questions.
I said to the actors at one point that if they were able to pose a question to a researcher that didn’t elicit a response then I would give them £10.
I am yet to pay anything out.
- You are opened up to worlds that you didn’t know much or anything about. Things that help feed you creatively but are also just interesting and useful to know about. What struck me most about this aspect in this project is that there seemed to be a palpable sense of interest and enthusiasm coming to us about the work that we do. That is, the researchers themselves, who had little knowledge about making theatre, were fascinated about how we work.
Having such a clear and democratic exchange of expertise was really heartening and bodes well for the rest of the process.
