Blueprint for performance: audiences invited to build imaginary places
Each time you walk through your front door, go to your office, or meet a friend at your local, you walk into a construction of memories as well as one of bricks and mortar. Memories create places every bit as much as places create memories.
One day a flower shop is just a flower shop. While it might not change on the map, the next day, and forever after, it is where I first kissed my wife.
Perhaps, as an expat, I’m more aware than most of how we each create our own spaces.
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I was raised in small-town Pennsylvania – roughly speaking, America’s Lancashire – and I moved around a lot post-education. A long-distance romance brought me across the Atlantic and I’ve been here for 14 years. We have a not-so-young-anymore daughter and England feels like home … as much as anywhere does.
This is why, I think, I find myself drawn to explorations of place. I have always liked games so, with no formal theatre training, that is where I look when thinking about creating a live experience. The performances I make aren’t really games, as no one can win (or lose!), but they feel like games. And the audience feel like the friends I’m playing with.
For the past five years, under the name The Unbuilt Room, I’ve been making performance-games based on places. I describe a place to small group of audience-players and ask what they want to do. They say “go through the door” or “pick up the key” and I describe the consequence of their action. It is very much based on the text-adventure computer games of the early 80s I grew up with … but completely lo-tech.
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The places I describe are based on the real building the audience and I are sitting in … but I have the freedom to rewrite reality. Where a door might simply be a closet, in the game it might hide a staircase to a secret passage.
It is basically an interactive form of storytelling: I describe, they explore and we make the place together. Afterwards, when the players walk back out through the real building, their experiences in the game are overlaid on the real space. I’ve had people tell me they have vivid memories of being in rooms that don’t exist.
To create the games I research the building’s history, talk to people who use the space in different ways, and spend time just poking around. I look at original plans and current blueprints and try to wrestle a building’s actual geography into a form I can use.
Battersea Arts Centre: the show goes on
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During the performance, the audience is in control and can take any route they wish … if I don’t know the map inside out I might accidentally rearrange the building mid-game. As the players explore, they create their own mental maps and, together, we bring to life a version of a place that never existed and never will. My next challenge is to open up the creation of the building to the audience, to expand their role from explorers to builders, something I’m attempting with the new, larger-scale game A House Repeated.
It’s based on Battersea Arts Centre, with the fabric of the building (the old town hall) forming the bones of the show. But the spirit of the place has been every bit as influential. BAC is extremely supportive of new theatre, nurturing productions from the initial idea through to the stage. After their recent fire, in which the grand hall burned down, the organisation faces the task of rebuilding. They are undertaking this in typical fashion, with a spirit of generosity and collaboration. Their challenge led me to the idea of A House Repeated.
I haven’t moved house in a long time and I find the buildings in my neighbourhood layered with more and more memories. I’m putting down roots, but still playing games and inventing new places … that closet door will always hide a staircase to a secret passage.
A House Repeated is at Battersea Arts Centre, London, as part of A Nation’s Theatre, 7-24 October