Location, location: Punchdrunk and beyond

Site-specific, immersive art has never been bigger. What's the secret of getting it right? Creative producer Tim Wilson introduces the Vault Festival in London's Old Vic Tunnels
Silent Opera, La Boheme
La Boheme. Silent Opera uses brand new recordings of opera’s greatest works to bring the genre into the modern, hi-tech world. Photograph: Chris Worthington/Silent Opera

I started off with Punchdrunk as a performer at the back end of Faust, then did a research show at Battersea Arts Centre and The Masque of the Red Death. Out of the back of that, we founded Heritage Arts. It was never my intention to be cool; what we wanted to do from the very start was honest storytelling.

Punchdrunk gives such heady exhilaration, an overwhelming stimulation of the senses. It's a fabulous thing and it's changed the face of what everyone's doing in storytelling. But we wanted to bring back something of the shared narrative. Punchdrunk audience members often say: "I wandered around on my own for a while." Accepting that as its own experience is really important when you're seeing that kind of show. But it's not what we do.

The first show we did hijacked this amazing 400-year-old fort on the Suffolk Coast, the site of the very last incursion on to English soil in 1666 on Landguard Point. The fort master David Morgan was a direct descendant of Captain Morgan of pirate rum fame and like Tristan Appleby, station manager here at the Tunnels, he was one man in a big organisation. English Heritage for David; Network Rail for Tristan. Both spied just enough of an opening to carve out a space and hand it over to the arts. And that, for want of a better word, is the golden goose.

What makes Vault Festival different from an event in a traditional arts venue? As soon as someone makes the decision, "Oh, I'm going to the White Cube" or "I'm going to the Duke of York's", they enter a mode of reception that's quite singular. They know what they're going to get. The Old Vic Tunnels have certain things we think we know by now like the graffiti on Leake Street. But then you take a left instead of a right to a place you've never been before. That confusion is like pressing the reset button and I think it's a really exciting place to build work – and art – from.

For companies like us, location is key. Here's this amazing space that is now a venue – what stories are suggested by it? There were two really exciting companies involved in last year's Coming Up festival, which I stagemanaged: one was Silent Opera and one was Kindle Theatre. Both aren't just scratching but knocking at the door of significant success and were looking for another presentation in London. So the first step was to bring them down here.

When we begin to understand what atmosphere is created by putting those two things side by side – what if you add in something else? What if you put in a cinema. What should that cinema show? Well, it's Hammer Horror. And what if you opened a bit later – what kind of parties would you run? A B-movie ball? Suddenly something begins to swim into shape where there used to be nothing.

In the last few years, the tools available to tell stories have become so varied. Silent Opera is the perfect example. There's no conductor but look behind you and you'll see a technician who is a trained conductor, only with 12 arms. He's "conducting" a piece we've recorded beforehand with an orchestra that runs on multiple tracks that he slows-down or speeds-up according to the message he wants to send to the singers. He then remixes what they sing and the audience hear it through their wireless headphones.

That's a hugely complicated process and mixed into that the audience are in a promenade performance, so you're blurring a number of different vehicles of transmission. The headline is technology, thinning the hedges between the fields so you can see through and between them.

Something I've learned from other festivals – we've designed the experiential side of things at Bestival and Standon Calling – is that I don't like feeling there's a load of stuff I'm missing. If I'm only seeing 20%, why have I paid the extra 80%? The big festivals are often constrained by budget. Someone hands over the money and says: "Make sure you get the entertaining stuff, make sure you get the jugglers and the stilts." I'd rather take Vault away from that and back to the idea of celebration and a day of mischief. Nothing encourages the playfulness that should be the cushion to all artistic activity like having a good time.

That said, there's never any point pretending that money and budgets aren't a big part of the process. We don't have any public funding. We have in the past but barely a blip on the radar, and it's not a way that we're going in the future either. But I don't want anyone to work for free. There are people here slogging their guts out and creating really exciting work and there's no money for them. So we've all got to figure out a way of running this sort of stuff.

Things are shifting and the shows and people we've got here are very much at the head of the queue to lead British art into a new phase. It's a networked thing. You see the guy running down the street from Tahrir Square, saying: "I'm a free man in a free country, thank you, Facebook" If he doesn't share anything in the whole of the rest of his life with those around him, he has shared that one moment of coming together.

We're not bringing anything down; we're not trying to destroy big organisations. What we've done is build something of the same size, strength and integrity as a traditional arts event without any sort of hierarchy. Hundreds of artists are involved, but that's the strength of the network: the fluidity and sudden focus of attention it can bring to one thing.

Tim Wilson was talking to Nancy Groves. Vault Festival runs from 9-26 February. For more details on The Heritage Arts Company follow them on Twitter @HeritageArts
