For Theatre Lab (Youth) students, their only ’embodied’ time during the pandemic was when they came to our farm, in Covid bubbles, to live and work. They harvested fruit and made a blended work called “What’s Inside?”. They built a duck pond and debated whether algorithms were more dependable than emotions. We hosted one group of students for a three-month residency. They entered, scared, insecure and left feeling connected and inspired by every animal and tree on the farm.
What we discovered was that the imagination too, if stuck within a fixed framework of understanding, stops growing. It requires the honesty of witnessing birth and death to clear its cobwebs. What use is the theatre canon when faced with an apocalypse? What use are theatre icons when young people face an uncertain future?
We now use these terms to describe our work:
•Laboratory – the farm
•Experiments – involving labour as body conditioning
•Chemistry – reactions between people of different class, caste, language
•Biology – nature, the source of understanding, inspiration, healing
•Physics – the volume, mass, density of the audience we build
•Geography – the spatiality of virtual and physical stages
•History – prioritising our own oral histories
•Maths – the economics of theatre-making
•Language – the intersections and politics of language
•Culture – as being something alive and expressive