Some come to hone, some to play, others to explore ideas and shape possibilities – the Sanctuary artist residency programme at Lighthouse offers a haven for creative intention across all artforms.
Formed in 2016 to bring innovative, top quality professional theatre into residential care settings, The Dot Collective’s work is inspired by creating joy through reminiscence. This typically begins in a care setting through workshops, enabling residents to share their stories, which inspire new shows and new writing, not just for the sake of writing, but to create shared experience. For participants, for their loved ones, and for audience members in arts venues these shows tour to, The Dot Collective’s work aims to shed light on what society so often perpetuates as solely dark.
The Dot Collective found its way to Lighthouse after founder Laura Harling moved from London to Southbourne and applied for a place to develop a new piece called Paradise Island. Or so she thought…
“Once we started unpacking all the ideas, what has become clear is that Paradise Island is an umbrella title for a new way of working with residential care participants with dementia in order to create truly accessible theatre,” she explains.
“The title came from a previous project where we discovered that escapism was very important for our participants, whether that was an ambition, or going back to a memory, or simply going to a desert island.
“Since applying though, a lot has developed and rather than trying to create a specific show here, it is more important to create a methodology and a toolkit for productions going forward.”
Laura, who named The Dot Collective after her grandmother, has been working with a mentor-dramaturg Dr Helen Evans as well as actors, singers, movement artists, access consultants and a video designer. Her sights are fixed firmly on establishing their method that creatively integrates access into theatre to make productions that can be performed in residential settings, in the open air, or in conventional theatre settings, allowing audiences of mixed abilities to engage equally.
“How do we provide a performance where everyone can sit together in a space where no one’s distracted or put off by each other?” asks Laura. “Actually, what we’ve found is that it’s usually the theatre goers without the additional need who feel uncomfortable. So it’s about recognising audience archetypes and responding to their behaviour to allow audiences to feel comfortable with each other. That’s part of what we’re working on now.”
Helen explains more: “We’ve spoken about giving agency to the viewer or participant to either view or participate. But in unlocking that agency, it’s about license, isn’t it? And understanding that you have license to say or do whatever you wish in the moment, which of course comes with a certain degree of risk, but also excitement.”
Inevitably then, no two shows will ever be the same because every performance elicits and is, to some extent, driven by the audience and the response to it of the performer in the moment.
“We’ve discovered that there’s two types of improvisation – the proposed improvisation, which is coming from the performers, and the inherent improvisation, which comes from the audience. And what we’re more interested in is the inherent improvisation. You can’t teach the audience what’s going to happen within the show because, in care, they won’t remember,” says Laura.
“A lot of what we’re doing this week is about trying out different ways that relate to sensory techniques. There’s the auditory, which is the more verbal and what lends itself best verbally, whether it’s single word narrative, or rhyming verse, or grommelot, or repetition; and then the audible which includes, music and foley work.
“For instance, people walking in the sand would be seen literally, the sound of them walking would be amplified through mics while the front row of the audience have their feet in the sand on this island so they can feel it. This moves into proprioception for our audience members, supporting cognitive processors for all audiences to enable to us to engage on whatever level we do and still meeting at the same key point of narrative.
“We’re also playing with illustration. If somebody’s talking about the island and the performer might ask if the sand is underneath you and what colour is it. They could be given a board and draw the lines of it and then that would be projected on stage. We’re going to research these techniques alongside live video projection.”
It’s an intense schedule, but one that will deliver its own rewards – something that Dot herself would appreciate and applaud.
“I set up The Dot Collective in response to my grandmother being in residential care. At the time, I was working as a producer and an actor and I asked her what she’d most like to do and she said she wanted to come and see me on stage, but obviously she couldn’t. That was when I suddenly thought: ‘Hang on, why is no one taking really good quality theatre into residential care when it wouldn’t be that hard to do?’ And so that was when we got whatever funding we could to see how it would fall and it worked. It was incredible.”
Nearly ten years later, this feels like a crucial time for the charity.
“Yes, very much so. This week at Lighthouse and the process we’re exploring is a turning point for The Dot Collective in that we are honing down what that methodology is to really benefit our audience through performance and to find a way of teaching for performers as well how to best do that. Ultimately, it will bridge a gap within professional theatre between the theatre and the outreach.”
https://www.thedotcollective.com/
(NC)
Main image: Jayne Jackson Photography
