Life is a series of changes that happen in stages, and when the stage is your life, it’s a change for the better every time you walk on.
This morning, myself and a team of three actors went into a government building and made people laugh. We tied them up, literally, in red tape: duct tape, barrier tape, masking tape. We tied people into their chairs and onto each other.
We taped people’s phones to their desks. We wrapped them up and hugged them and whispered naughty things in their ears. We stuck red tape on men’s shirts, one patch above each nipple, and another one, you know, down there. We put tape onto people’s foreheads and over their mouths. We taped their legs together.
We also performed a short interactive show, including some suitably obscene gestures (like a mime about ‘inputs’ and ‘outcomes’) 10 times, in 90 minutes. And got paid for it, quite well.
This performance was a compassionate message about fraud, about the “irregular spending” that increases because people take ‘short-cuts’ due to the suffocating volume of red tape. The feedback was excellent, we were told we were spot on. “How did you know all about our bureaucratic processes?” I was asked in the lift.
Well, I answered, we have a duty to tell the audience’s truth. We have to speak their language, so we have to learn it. We have to know what your acronyms are and what they mean and where they go and what they do.
Despite the message, however, what was of most value to me, and probably to this working community, was that colleagues saw each other laugh, and laughed together. They became human to each other, in their uncontained joy, and not the mute grey drones they looked like when we had entered their workspace earlier.
How did this happen, I wondered, on the way home. And my first thought was oh, it’s because you worked for these people five years ago. And they had then reminded me I’d worked with them another five years before that. I stayed in contact. I gave myself permission to pat myself on the back. I’d seen something through, after starting making theatre in the workplace 20 years ago.
Negotiating the ups and downs of working for myself has been a relentless struggle. It takes a massive amount of trust for people to invest in what I can provide, which has also changed, over the years. Now, most of the time instead of doing what is called ‘industrial theatre’ I practice and develop my ‘applied theatre’ skills, with colleague who is a dramatherapist. These are skills I have accumulated without knowing it.
Applied theatre, briefly, is a rag-bag term to describe when you get rid of the actors and help people in the room to connect in new ways, to perform, improvise, play, and encourage them into a new (or forgotten) understanding of who they are, what they hope for, and how they can be. It is very affirming work, because it makes such a huge difference to people. It feels good.
Our last work was in a glue factory. This is a place I cold-called 17 years ago. Every two or three years I’d call, and my bi-monthly emailer would include them. Finally, after all that time, I got a call. We’re interested in what you have to offer, they said. After the success of our sessions with staff last year, we’ve been invited back. This is not what I imagined myself doing when I set out to make theatre in the workplace as a much younger man.
I have had to forcibly remind myself in moments both good and bad, that things change, that times of both abundance and scarcity don’t last.
Sometimes the change has been gradual, imperceptible, and only fully apparent once it has been witnessed, even verbalised, by someone else. Sometimes the change has been like a sudden falling off, like an avalanche, opening new perspectives and possibilities that can be tenderly, carefully explored.
For me, it’s been a combination of luck, courage and trust in what I do that has made this happen. Self-doubt and a self-critical voice have accompanied me on my journey, and often held me back. Being a perfectionist hasn’t helped either. But somehow by just staying the course, I’ve arrived at a place I never expected, a place I’d never set out for. And the view from here is exceptional.
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