"Theatre should be like stepping onto a tightrope every night not plodding down a well trodden path.
Even when you’re on your 300th performance there should still be a sense of spontaneity, a fizz of adrenaline and a feeling that the actors themselves don’t quite know what’s going to happen. It’s easier to shake things up and find freshness with new and more devised work (we all know what happens at the end of Romeo and Juliet before it even starts). As a performer I never subvert the story or the focus but I often shake things up, change rhythms, find something new."
"You're absolutely in connection with your fellow colleagues and the audience. The storytelling takes people on a journey."
"Both Emma Rice and I absolutely believe in the collective imagination of the room. If you can create the conditions for that kind of creativity, the collective imagination is going to give you far more than you could come up with on your own.
We quite often task people. Fairly quickly people respond to the provocation and come up with something interesting. Both Emma and myself are reluctant to tell people what to do. If there's one thing I'd like people to do within the arts it is to be instinctive and to make offers."
"There's any number of ways to describe what an ensemble is, but for me, it's a group of people who are on a journey with the work, who have some shared beliefs and, ideally, some shared language. They are going to be brave and are going to step into the unknown, which is what devising is as well."
"One of the ways to get people to care is if there’s a sense of shared ownership. That's why we always worked collectively while , at the same time, giving writers, designers, musicians the autonomy to work independently when they needed to"
"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 I believe that we have to strive to do so, as fear and anxiety thwart creativity."
"When you're devising, you are going to create a fair bit of chaos."
"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 script."
"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 structure."
"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. Know where your teammates are, know where the focus is and always know what the story is otherwise the ball will run into touch."
"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?”"
"I believe that once the body is energised and the blood is oxygenated then creativity comes to the fore."
"I like to see the workings of theatre. I like there to be magic as well, where you don't know how that's happened, but I like to see the workings of it too."
"Live musicians bring an immediacy. It’s important to place the music and give it its full impact. I’m not keen on underscoring. A live band adds real power to the live storytelling. Much of Kneehigh’s work has been in epic spaces where dense dialogue is not appropriate. In a way we often work filmically where soundtrack leads the action and text is more minimal."
"I’m a little bit sceptical of original ideas..."
"This show was created in the early days of Emma and Stu Barker’s working relationship and was mainly soundtracked: Wagner, Offenbach, Jurassic Five etc. The production was managed by the uber-efficient Alex Wardle at the start of his five-year stay with Kneehigh. It was an extraordinary, brave and distinctive show which was coolly reviewed by Kneehigh faithful, but subsequently really took off and heralded the brilliant new era of Emma Rice’s directing."
"The chorus in The Red Shoes were a chorus who’d seen things we should never have seen and done things we should never have done. We mingled with the audience. Before we started, we were barefoot, and we were just in underwear, and the first thing that we did when we went on stage was to very carefully wash and dry our feet."
"At the time of making the show in the early 2000s, Emma and I were really into Tarantino and films like Pulp Fiction: bloody good storytelling and great music. This Tristan & Yseult is a Tarantino version of a medieval story.
This show was made to be outdoors. The structure is invented for the outside: the storytelling, dance, action and music are outward facing – the direct, honest acting exemplified by Craig Johnson (as Brangian) in this show is to do with being in daylight and being able to see the audience and then, as darkness falls,letting the fourth wall in and deepening the emotion and sense of tragedy."
"Ideas are everywhere"
"Improvisation is really important for storytelling."
Mike Shepherd
Founder, Performer, Director 
