Looking at the history of the last 20 years, it seems obvious that the revolution of the theatre scene would come from one of the countries with the strongest artistic culture such as the United Kingdom. The Punchdrunk company has conquered the world with its large-scale shows, and inspires many authors. Let’s take a look at their latest creation, THE BURNT CITY, currently presented in London, with Felix Barrett, Artistic Director, and Maxine Doyle, Co-Director and Choreographer of the shows.
Photo credit: Julian Abrams (Performer: Omagbitse Omagbemi)
Punchdrunk is a British theater company that is known for its immersive, site-specific productions. The company was founded in 2000 by artistic director Felix Barrett, and has since become known for its unique approach to theater, which combines elements of storytelling, performance, and installation art to create immersive and interactive experiences for audiences.
Punchdrunk’s productions are often staged in unconventional locations, such as abandoned buildings or warehouses, and allow the audience to move freely through the space, interacting with the performers and the environment as they explore the story. This approach creates a sense of immersion and interaction that is unique to Punchdrunk’s work, and has helped the company gain a reputation as one of the leading innovators in the world of immersive theater.
Punchdrunk, over 20 years Live on Stage
Felix Barrett – I am the artistic director of Punchdrunk, now 22 years old officially. Weirdly, if I may say, live theatre found me. I’ve sort of been doing this work ever since my university days – when I was looking at how to put the audience at the heart of the action, and how to change the context of their experience. Punchdrunk came organically out of that. For my final exams, I did a piece where the audience wore masks and explored a building. Following this, I realized I could create for space but I couldn’t do the performance language. And that’s when I met Maxine!
Maxine Doyle – My lineage is much more traditional. I had a small dance/theatre company and – just before I met Felix – I was sort of feeling disheartened with the scale, the process of touring, the venues, the atmosphere. I started doing some of my shows in bars. Nothing innovative with space, actually, but doing more things to do with having DJs, afterwards, more atmosphere… When I met Felix, it was just great timing because I was interested in lifting my process and physical storytelling and reconsidering that within Felix’s vision of space.
Live or Immersive Theatre?
F. B. – We’ve never called ourselves immersive, but I acknowledge that we are part of the immersive movement. For my part, we come from a sympathetic side in the middle of theatre, film and live art by ideology. But that’s semantics, I suppose. Our bread and butter is live shows, live events. We’ve also experimented with TV, screens, and game mechanics. That’s a huge part of where we’re going now. We’ve done projects with musicians, trying to reinvent the gig. But yes, the work we have done together for the last 20 years now is taking over big empty buildings and transforming them into something that’s akin to an open world experience.
M. D. – It’s fair to say that all of my work – definitely in the last 15 years with Felix – is really focussed on these mask-based shows. Lots of other innovations in content and form actually come from Felix and Punchdrunk. It’s good to make that distinction because sometimes we get brandished that we’re a mask-show only company. There’s many different forms of work that Felix and Punchdrunk have undertaken. And also for myself independently, I’ve started to look at site specific based dance work, which isn’t Punchdrunk really – looking at the idea of a more abstract dance, outside of the theatre.
About The Audience, Boundaries and Being Lost
F. B. – A modern contemporary audience needs to have agency. If they’re static in a seat, then they don’t – because that’s an established and successful art form for the past 5000 years. If they’re moving, that’s quite different. A modern audience needs empowerment because they’re used to having it, whether that is with smartphones or computers. For example looking at my sons, how they engage with the world, they’re used to having total agency. To have that taken away would feel inauthentic. Like they’d been cheated.
F. B. – I’m not sure whether the mask shows achieve the goal of giving the audience complete agency, because actually they’re still more of a passive observer. But they can choose the angles they look at. As long as the audience knows the context, they have complete clarity about the context in which they’re viewing the work, then they’re free to run it safely within that boundary.
M. D. – In life we don’t always know what we’re doing. We don’t know what’s around the corner. And at the same time, it gets more challenging to be spontaneous. I think these shows potentially thrust an audience into moments of presence, and moments of liveness and spontaneity, where you’re not sure what you’re going to bump into. There’s a sort of excitement, energy and friction that’s interesting, seductive about that.
THE BURNT CITY: A Story of 2 Worlds (and 2 Buildings)
F. B. – To have such a venue (the Woolwich Arsenal in London) for THE BURNT CITY is a real freedom. Such a large canvas to create is incredible because it gives us more opportunities. There’s more corners where you could find moments of intimacy, and there are more moments for people to get lost, stumble across something. And that’s the real power of our work! The power of everyone’s exploration is in solving the mystery box of the show, and you need to have this world of opposites. It’s a complex and elaborated ecosystem that needs a little of everything to breathe.
M. D. – With scale comes the opportunity for distance. Actually, the distance is the possibility to have a long shot, then a close up shot within the work, but also distance from the outside world, distance from your history distance and your baggage. All support an intensity that we’re hoping an audience can take away if they want to. It’s very easy to skate through a Punchdrunk experience and not engage with it, if it’s not your desire. And it can feel slight! The more you reveal yourself as a human being within the context of these worlds, then the more the experience enriches you. The scale of the experience is definitely part of that.
F. B. – THE BURNT CITY came about because we have two buildings rather than one. We knew we wanted to look at the Greeks because that’s where Western theatre began. The body of the material is so dense that we were able to excavate as deep as possible to create multiple layers of audience. Depending on whether it’s their first visit or their 10th visit, to make sure it was open to interrogation at every level. It feels like all stories can be found within Greek mythology. We didn’t know which we wanted to use until the space told us what to do. There aren’t many stories that you can tell from two different perspectives. Our final story around that original mythic Great War came quite quickly and organically once we decided on Woolwich Arsenal.
M. D. – I suppose the mask show that we’re most famed for – because of longevity – is SLEEP NO MORE (currently playing in New York and China). Obviously, the sources are totally different with THE BURNT CITY, so we’re telling totally different stories, with different wires. But where SLEEP NO MORE is a six-floors building, with this escalating spiral of narratives lying on top of each other, in a very vertical way, THE BURNT CITY is the opposite of that. It’s much more sprawling, horizontal, with things happening simultaneously. And I think in a way there’s been much more a sense of nostalgia in it, a very different sentiment in these two worlds we explore. And we set up our own Trojan Wars. Troy is a neon drenched labyrinth – a kind of future which is aesthetically, physically messier, more anarchic in its storytelling and its atmosphere. As if Ancient Greece was picked up from an art Deco style and thrust into a post-modern future. That for me feels like it’s the biggest difference, and with that idea it’s very much closer to a film aesthetic.
F. B. – From day one, we decided to work around two different sets – with the space involved. When we plan a show, it’s about breaking established rules. You always want to pull the rug from underneath the audience’s feet – knowing the variety and audience craving, we had to surprise them! No better thing to have someone spending an hour in Old Greece, then suddenly hit Troy and it’s a reveal – and vice versa.
M. D. – We also have the distance between the gods and the mortals, and – physically and emotionally – they occupy very different spaces in our storytelling and set up for the performers. Plus, we have that amazing cabaret bar that sits in the middle of Troy. It has a very different set of questions for the audience, and a different engagement with direct interactions. A perfect fit to balance these two worlds.
F. B. – And the background of the story helped us as well.. Taking on the Trojan War, we asked ourselves about each team, what do they win, what do they lose? There is power, fire, hope in their stories. There’s a sense of rebirth and there’s a sense of overall future potential for them. And it was a joyous aesthetic challenge as to how we can make it as different as possible?
Performing a Live Immersive Show
M. D. – With the performers, it’s a really collaborative process to begin with. Felix and I have done a huge amount of work around the show, and we always offer a sort of storyboard of journeys across the space that come from the source texts. Some stories are really developed like Agamemnon or Hecuba, others much more to discover. It’s a very collaborative journey, both in the creation of the material or the creation of the text, whether it’s writing or the creation of ideas, actually. And it evolves like that. But I think the biggest shift, night after night, is the audience. The content itself is very set, even though it feels spontaneous. On the other hand, the dynamic of the audience always changes.
M. D. – That’s one of the reasons why we work with performers that are trained in contemporary dance or actors with a really intuitive sense of listening. Sometimes you have to adapt the choreography right to the moment if you need to move the audience out of the way or to literally dance around them. And that’s the biggest thing. Not mentioning of course what the audience brings with them. Each night, the party audience brings a very different dynamic, depending if it’s a Friday night or a Sunday. They’re having to listen to all of these different energies.
M. D. – A show like THE BURNT CITY evolves constantly. From the previous shows in Spring 2022, the biggest shift actually is the space. Felix totally redesigned the bar and the entrance completely. The content of the show actually is more nuanced, even if it’s essentially the same thing of course.
F. B. – All of our work is about the collision. If we do Shakespeare where we’re smashing it against something which is unexpected, like Film Noir or Hitchcock, we try to break the rules. We worked with a documentary film director, for a linear live show that became a haunted house. With Niantic also for interactive outside experiences. We’re always trying to defy our ambition. The intention is to try and defy expectations so an audience doesn’t know what they’re going to get when they walk through a door. Mask shows are the most well-known of course. I hope there’s a beautiful kinetic energy emerging when you run two forces that are opposing. This is what we stand for and hopefully our audience feels those sparks.
F. B. – Felix tends to bring the main creative sources and then I just add my additional collisions to it. Which sometimes collide or sometimes take us deeper. My process is particularly collaborative with the performers. I try to give them as much information as we can, whether that might be images that are directly related to the work, but might provoke a response or a reaction. It’s about feeding the artists, really, so that they come up with some interesting stuff for us.
Building a Live Open World (and Yes, Music!)
F. B. – It’s always “Building first”. There’s no point putting a square peg in a round hole. The place gives you permission for the sorts of texts and ideas that we can go to. Then we build the world we imagine. You need to know what the landscape is like, what action is happening within that landscape. It becomes a design challenge first and a narrative challenge next. Then we’ll have the process of unpacking those stories with the cast and soundtracking them, and finally throwing it to the audience. It’s chaos for a few weeks (around rehearsals and preview shows), then finally it settles.
F. B. – We script that, not necessarily in a conventional script. With the TV thing we learned, we had to script in a traditional way. We spent years speaking a different language with TV people. And as soon as we changed the font of the way we described it to a sort of screenplay, then suddenly that’s what we’re doing. We realized that we had to write everything down when you’re planning something like that because everyone needs to be on the same page. In everything, music and sound are still real drivers for the story – to establish the tone etc. Because it’s linear! It’s all about the crescendo, where the high point is at the end and working backwards from that.
M. D. – And there are so many different layers of sound in our work, in all formats of what we’re doing. And in all of the masked shows, Felix always has a strong orchestral source and inspiration. Coming from dance originally, I would be nervous about using such big music. Then, working around a space you realize it’s actually about building needs and consuming these huge dramatic scores. That layer of sound design is a very textural one, with sometimes more specific audio work that pushes the narrative. It even drills down to sound coming out of the radio of a radio station.
F. B. – The music is definitely a starting point for us. Actually, we have real sonic markers that craft the world. Our Creative Director Stephen Dobbie is an incredibly skilled artist, actually sort of corralling and enticing the audience with his sound palette. The whole music thing must really feel like you’re inside of it, as you’re inside a film. The soundtrack is really just in the ears of our audience members. It has to fit in perfectly.
M. D. – We very much construct a soundtrack. And it’s interesting because – obviously – there’s lots of movement, dance in the work. It feels like the characters should dance to the music – as if they almost don’t hear it, and it becomes an accompaniment or a layer. There is a real sense of filmic scoring. Obviously, there’s some scenes where they’re clubbing and they’re really listening to it, where it’s a part of the action. But often it’s a dramatic or an emotional addition to the scene.
Punchdrunk: From Live Show to VR and Television
F. B. – We don’t work the same way for live shows as we do for linear content such as a television series (THE THIRD DAY for HBO and Sky Atlantic in 2020, developed with Dennis Kelly, including a 12-hours special live episode) or a virtual reality experience (BELIEVE YOUR EYES, with Samsung). And that’s simple, because the audience isn’t free roaming in a space! They’re specifically on rails. And we did shows without free roaming, for us it was a completely different approach to our work. You know what they’re going to be looking at any given point. That is a different crafting of the experience. With mask shows, we do it on multiple scale levels simultaneously. You need to think about the arc of feeling for the audience, what you want to feel at any point of it – what’s the crescendo of emotion, the rollercoaster of “tactile feeling”.
F. B. – We’re doing a lot of things in areas we haven’t explored yet. We’re doing live shows that take a long time to prepare, so we’re prepping things for the future that haven’t been announced yet. But we’re always looking at the bricks of form and … How can you submerge an audience as deeply as possible in the world of a show? It might be through technology, via a screen, as they walk home from work. It’s a multitude of ways you can do that.
Book the show: https://onecartridgeplace.com/theburntcity/
More about: https://www.punchdrunk.com
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