Archive

Devising is hard, it needs improvisation skills which take time to develop, it needs a generosity and, somehow, a joy of creation. It seems to be increasingly hard to keep fear and anxiety at bay but …

Mike Shepherd

Don’t labour your ideas. Ideas come easy and Emma always said that bad ones (ideas) usually take care of themselves (by dropping away). Be brave. Be present and respond. Be intellectual when you need …

Ian Ross

When you're devising, you are going to create a fair bit of chaos.

Mike Shepherd

We talked a lot about archetypes, which is where mask work would come in: through masks you could distill an archetype. Then the real detail of that work was to do contra-archetype, so you could show …

Emma Rice

With the writer or writers, we talk and dream, we map out the structure and the overall shape of the piece. They go away and write collections of poems or lyrics or ideas. Each writer works in a …

Emma Rice

I find Ladybird books quite useful! Simple books which give you the structure and the story, but they also give you lots of opportunity to open the story up without being consumed by 125 pages of …

Mike Shepherd

Emma commissioned both me and Carl (Grose) for Tristan & Yseult, writing a series of poems and dialogues, rather than a full script. She said, “Anna, I want you to write the voice of the unloved …

Anna Maria Murphy

At the risk of seeming over-simplistic I always remember Miss Hibbs even when approaching something as dense as Gunther Grass’s Tin Drum or Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. It helps me understand narrative …

Mike Shepherd

I try to write the bits that come easily first, like the best bits: the bits that feel like they're already almost there. I'll tackle the bits that I can already see. That's quite a good way of …

Carl Grose

In discussions and workshops, we end up with bits of paper taped, like big PostIt Notes™. Each bit of paper might be particular images that we like, or a key moment of the show or story. For example, …

Sarah Wright

You're absolutely in connection with your fellow colleagues and the audience. The storytelling takes people on a journey.

Mike Shepherd

A simple game of ‘keepy uppy’ can really help alertness, awareness of the group, sharpen antennae, focus and build ensemble. A good theatre show needs a good team actively practicing these qualities. …

Mike Shepherd

I find that my brain works really well if I butterfly around an idea, and then I tend to land on something which isn't the thing itself, but it gives me a different map. It's what gives you a fresh …

Emma Rice

I think about it a lot in my work, which is that we're all scared all the time. Performing is a really scary thing to do, because you're not just scared, as we all are, but you're doing it in front …

Emma Rice

A good way of storytelling is getting an audience on the edge of their seat going, “Oh my God, what's going on? What's going to happen next?”

Mike Shepherd

You can’t rest on what you know, and you can't relax into research. You're sort of dancing at the edge of a precipice all the time, which is what Kneehigh felt like. Kneehigh do no research. There is …

Emma Rice

I believe that once the body is energised and the blood is oxygenated then creativity comes to the fore.

Mike Shepherd

If you're making a piece of theatre, you're asking the audience to engage their imagination anyway. A puppet is part of the imagined world created by the performance. A puppet guides our imagination …

Sarah Wright