The mature professional practitioner-deviser in Higher Education 
How I made the pilot performance ‘Redhair and Daffodil Friend’ with TaPP students at Salford University

For some years now I have had the opportunity to work on some really stimulating and creative projects within the Theatre and Performance Practice programme at the University of Salford.  It has both informed and enhanced my professional work.  For example, The Feast and Birnam Wood projects connected to  explorations around Shakespeare’s Macbeth and my walking practice which culminated during the pandemic in the online programme Just Walk. The presence and opportunity for professional practitioners in the academy has been very valuable to me throughout my creative journey because of the direct contact with fledgling makers and performers and the touchstone it gives with the contemporary.

During the early part of 2024 I was invited to work at Salford again  as a visiting director towards the TaPP Fest[1] module with second year Theatre and Performance Practice[2] students and third year Technical Theatre (Production and Design)[3]students. The experience took me back to my early theatre making days[4]. It took me back to my own starting points and it also took me aback in the challenges presented by working with young people a third of my age.  I was indeed the granny in the room.

Fortunate to have the chance to return my recently published children’s book Redhair and Daffodil Friend[5] to the theatre space, I found myself very challenged by the experience and surfaced with four questions:

• Am I now too old to work alongside young emerging practitioners in the academy and am I losing my touch?
• Is my story still appropriate for today’s young audiences and young theatre makers?
• How might I pull off a professional production of the piece learning from this student production?
• Should I meet that inner compulsion to ‘do it again’ at my age?

The module begins with the second-year theatre and performance students having to consider how to market the product they are making. They adopt all the supporting roles and functions that facilitate this process before they even get to the nitty gritty of making and performing what they will take to market. They play the roles of front of house liaison, designers, copy writers, social media marketeers and so on. As happens in the real world of creating and producing, these activities can steal time from the creator making their work on a very limited budget and without the ability to pay the professionals trained to perform those roles. But it’s  useful no doubt to experience and understand the full process of mounting a production from scratch. Nevertheless it did present its challenges for the ten performer/makers in the group I was leading.

As part of their assessment the students must produce an analysis of their marketing/production roles as well as reflect on the process of making and performing.  Additionally they must write a short critique of a professional work they see during the module. All this is then presented in a Microsoft Sway document. It constitutes 30% of their final mark but occupies far more time and space in their minds during the 12-week production process is afforded in its 70% allocation. This causes all kinds of difficulties and conflicts, reflective of my own experiences concerning the tension between making and marketing creative work.

When creating the book I had to face a huge marketing task as a fledgling independent publisher in 2022.  It’s one thing writing a story but it’s completely different trying sell it. With this stage adaptation I wanted to avoid developing a completely different brand from the published book. The branding for the finished book had been hard-earned.

I had paid for a professional job when I worked with the book’s illustrator Fruzsina Czech over the year prior to publication. So for this production the students had access to professionally produced visual assets. This constraint pointed to one of the many challenges facing a professional practitioner entering the same space as students of that profession.   It’s worth dwelling here in the marketing space, because I did share it with the students due to the book’s journey so far. Within that shared space I learned much about the mediation of the essence of my story through witnessing what they came up with as they grappled with the challenges of the story’s themes.  It was the way the students redescribed the story that had the most impact for me.

Here is my original description:

“Redhair and Daffodil Friend is set in the fantastical coastal city of Brinepoint. It is a story about friendship, loyalty and minding your own business. It is about living with uncertainty at a time when learning to take responsibility is a challenge.

The two inseparable sisters are left home alone guarding Brinepoint’s unique magical defences against extreme winters and summers. Lurking in the shadows is a shady guy determined to make money from the magic. How will the diligent girls prove themselves when left in charge? How will they cope when time and nature confuse the seasons while their mam is far away, sharing the magic?”

The story has had a very long gestation taking several forms over the years, emerging in various incarnations during my creative journey with it. I knew its content and fairytale form well.  It has been on my mind and in my body since 1988. I have considered the many questions and conundrums it presents. The story had been closely interrogated first with my director (Nigel Stewart) in 1988 when I was a fledgling theatre maker. Then the young artists (The Little Herberts) led by professional practitioners (Ian Cameron, Ali Maclaurin, Venice Manley and Richard Talbot) nurtured it when I led its development as a gallery-based installation, in 2001. Then most recently it steered a course with editorial consultants and readers between 2017 and 2022 as it finally became an illustrated children’s chapter book. However, this student incarnation was the first attempt to turn it into a play, something I wasn’t sure would be possible.

One of the most challenging tasks in taking an idea to full play production is how you sell it to the audience so that you get people to pay for tickets and add enough income to the production budget to warrant the production budget necessary for a large cast, finally making the books balance.  None of these factors are presented in this module.  The economy of the production rests mainly within the student fees and the module budget which only stretches to pay the visiting director along with £80 for materials.  I was reminded of the £1000 budget I had saved for my first show in 1989 when I paid the creatives first and myself last of all when the show broke even. We didn’t have a marketing budget. I discovered that necessity later.

By far the most challenging aspect of mounting professional creative work is the marketing of the idea to funders, venue/festival programmers and the public.  What did I learn from the students who broached this challenge albeit in a quasi-professional manner?

Delightfully very early on in the process one student challenged me on the economy within Brinepoint (the mythical city in the book), observing that the citizens must have worked for pay since Daffodil Friend (a character in the book) had a paper round.  This opened all kinds of enquiries around how the people of Brinepoint occupied themselves.  In this version though, we settled for stallholders, a journalist, an events manager and a couple of tour guides. Already I was contemplating a re-write but had assured myself a prequel may well answer many of these questions and with more in-depth consideration than could ever be imagined in what amounted to only a three-week process this time around. Besides, this was an adaptation, so we didn’t have to stay true to my book. Ouch!

Combining the book’s blurb (I had worked on with an editor) with their own marketing speak one student wrote a surprising summary of the piece describing Brinepoint as ‘a peaceful, sustainable, climate-conscious, caring community where residents’ needs are met…’[6] This description was impressive.

She continues, ‘… One Ear arrives and sets about obtaining the magic key and magic needle in a bid to make a fortune. He leaves chaos in his wake. Naive to his misdemeanours the residents of Brinepoint are left with no choice but to work for him in his factory manufacturing fake keys and fake needles. It isn’t long before this turns into slave labour as One Ear exploits them to serve his capitalist agenda.’[7]

I don’t think I would ever have used “capitalist agenda” so directly to market the book, but on reflection it seems an appropriate term for an adult audience. Our audience was mainly adult. I think two children in total attended and they didn’t understand the political themes, not that it mattered, ‘They really enjoyed it, particularly all the bits with the bad guy and the audience interaction…. I think maybe it was a bit complicated for them, particularly in the middle with the industrialists etc.’[8]

I am reminded of a review of the book on social media:

‘Want your children to read a good socialist tale? Look no further than this excellent offering.’[9]

The story obviously straddles both camps. I have always seen the story as appropriate for both the adults and children, but this has created a dilemma and I imagine mounting this production professionally could prove to be even more difficult than selling the book. Originally, I had thought it wiser to play down the political content of the story, given its impressionable younger readers. The student concludes, ‘This story explores themes of climate change, sustainability, capitalism, exploitation, working parents, care-experienced children, loyalty, responsibility, and friendship.’[10]

There’s a lot in there that speaks to both audiences which may be useful as I consider developing the work to a fuller production if that is the way to go.

It’s important to restate that this project’s creative community comprised 10 second year performers and makers and 4 final year technical students. The privilege of working with technical students who are learning and full of passion to experiment was truly exhilarating. The technical team comprised of an astute, tenacious and creative sound technician and a generous trailblazing lighting designer who both proved themselves to be industry ready. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with them again in that capacity. There was a stage manager who worked conscientiously under quite challenging circumstances. In some respects the project required her to be company manager too, given the tensions that became apparent during the making process.  I have worked this module several times before but never with final year technical students. Their presence confirmed to me that they had been through all the growing pains associated with second year modules, which in my experience sit quite casually for the second-year student. It’s only at the end of the second-year module that the enormity of the task of their chosen pathway dawns.  This making experience serves to inform and hopefully instil in the final year that this is neither a game nor a hobby; it’s serious and it can be difficult.  This dawning happened for some of my ten performers during the final week of our collaboration.

After some time away from making my work in the black box[11], having taken a different pathway into a walking, movement and writing practice, I noticed at the outset how much the rehearsal room seemed less fraught for me. There seemed to me to be nothing original the students might come up with for all the reasons discussed.  This was my work, and I knew it well, so I completely relaxed. Normally I am devising with no story, not knowing anything. But this time we had the story, we even had the world – the fictional city of Brinepoint with all its colour, idiosyncratic power systems, its economy of gifting and its odd characters. Our first session after the audition workshop was sitting in a circle reading the full ten chapters aloud. The audition session had also consisted of me reading aloud while they moved based on a physical exercise I had set them up with.  Confident in the tried and tested devising approach I have been developing over some thirty years, I decided to let them run freely with my story for ten days, in effect two weeks of a three-week process. It is surprising that training for the industry includes only half the time that would be allowed for product creation in the real world.

As a stimulation I had introduced the coloured fabrics used with The Little Herberts in 2001[12], along with suggested music and sound elements from that original work. I don’t think any of the students consulted the original material in any detail because they would have alluded to it in their evaluations. The movement work with fabrics and some of my physical trainings were important ingredients and repeated here. I added to the movement vocabulary the Joged Amerta Movement basics[13] I had been working with from which my own subsequent creative pathway had emerged since my time out of the black box.  These fundamentals formed the bedrock of the preliminary adaptation work in the space. I then set up a weave of sophisticated group combinations which involved pairs of students unpacking a chapter, pulling out its essence to suggest a provocation for staging and interpretation by the rest of the group. This formed the basis of the production script. I asked them to extract the essence of the story and not to focus too much on the dialogue within the story.  This abstraction and insistence on brevity required them to have to constantly check back in the book when something seemed to be missing or seemed contradictory or just didn’t make sense.

My role in the room remained as a light touch facilitator edging them towards the collaboratively adapted structure around the ten chapters which became scenes. The difference this time was that I consciously let go and sat and watched them after setting them up. Acutely aware of my position as their tutor and educational guide, I cautiously suggested and encouraged them to see the work as their own, since I was ‘the writer and too close to the material’. But I had an eagle eye on their every move. It’s a tacit devising skill I have developed through many years of practice. It requires the creators to move towards an autonomy with the work that hides the hand of the director.  It implies the actor is the author of the work.  I patiently watched all their work and filmed each landing point/summary, constructing a montage of their improvisations with notes and questions embedded into each summary film I edited to aid their further enquiries.

I teased out from the group the person I considered most capable of assistant directorial work to assist on the production. This proved challenging to the person asked to do this.  I have since realised that one must be very explicit and direct with students now. I have been so used to a more organic process where this role just arises during the development.   The potential assistant directors usually emerge naturally, and there is often more than one in a group process. But according to the module, all students need a production role. I hadn’t bargained for the scramble for leadership that emerged from my light touch.

Interestingly plagued by repeated absence in the group, the dynamic seemed to change each time we met. The creativity of the room became skewed as each leader emerged but then was absent again.  The absence seemed to be something that was completely acceptable with no knock-on effect, so strong characters would return and take over the helm as if nothing had happened in the meantime.  I am not sure how much experimental practice happens in the years prior in their training, but it seems to me that pre-expressive experience is limited to traditional youth theatre practice, high school musical styles or very basic dance practices where steps are more important than the inner body presence.

Regarding the initial work with them, it was good for me to take my foot off the gas, I learned not to cow-tow to a dance tutored mythology; but rather to remember the specific differences between high school musical dance practice, authentic movement practice and ‘physical theatre’ practice that is virtually unrecognisable now compared with my training in that form. I also realised that the work could be viewed as not so fashionable now as one lecturer had pointed out, but that it didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable.  Another challenge was to have to accept students don’t always do their homework these days and whilst you might not want to tread on toes, the saying that ‘we always serve the work first’, still holds true, even though it’s now more painful to receive, when the claims voiced are, ‘but we are working so hard.’ Most of them are working almost a full-time job as well as their studies and many have extenuating circumstances as well as the natural challenges I have already referred to. Now and again I tentatively offered an exercise to troubleshoot some of their blocks.  Much of this work depended on their consistent engagement at the edit stage. I found this particularly frustrating. I checked the online working script work every day; it was inconsistent and sometimes not even happening I am sorry to say.  This sat uncomfortably and I often felt short changed. In fact I went through phases of inner rage and frustration. So I reminded myself that they weren’t professionals. My grip tightened and it was a shock to them, and maybe a relief to some. By the eleventh day and into the final week I was at the helm again with the usual tactics that have served me well in getting a piece to its required public performance state in a short space of time.

Having always been a nurturing facilitator and used to young people giving, giving and giving again, it was also salutatory to be confronted with their need for praise when praise may not be useful. I wanted to be authentic with them, so said it how it was.  This didn’t always go down very well. I wonder if the mature professional practitioner in the room is useful anymore for the student who wants constant reassurance and praise. Or were they just not tuning in to my voiceovers as they worked? Were they not hearing me name them and say, “good, good, more of that,” and so on? Is this need connected to their school education or to COVID or something else?  I realised that direct observation or critique would not work for this group, so I approached them with a different kind of stealth that spoke to some but relied on the innately creative individuals within the group to be much stronger. Unfortunately, allowing the free run squashed the courage of the creative individuals. I discovered a joy of working with neuro-divergent students and reading their reflections on their process.  I was struck by the quietness of the men in the room compared with the women and wondered about their possible suppression by the women due to my loose approach in the early stages and the overly high school musical approach that ruled the room for a time. But I also appreciated the presence of a mature student who had some experience of learning in the conservatoire environment, often a challenge to the ‘uni environment’. She was a valuable and diplomatic voice in the room.

This work has always been a physical entity for me and indeed was written on my own body a long time ago.  We had strong words during the final stages when I weathered the storms that came crashing in during the last four days of the final week.  This is the nature of the creative process.  Ultimately in the final showings one doesn’t see the underbelly of the completed work, thank goodness. One thing that didn’t change for me was the exhilaration of finally realising the work and how that wipes away all the difficulties as you find yourself like a child saying, ‘do it again’. I cannot believe that I still feel a compulsion to develop this work with a professional cast and have caught myself asking for advice on how to go about this, having been out of the saddle for so long.

However in really letting go, I think the students in this process identified for me pertinent and potentially rich areas for further development as I seek to further realise the story as a children’s play with a professional cast and crew, if the opportunity and funding is available. The work in this phase has motivated me to consider its possibilities despite it not being fashionable. It also fuelled my convictions that a prequel would be both rewarding and necessary to answer my own questions as to where it all came from. Who are the citizens of Brinepoint, who are their ancestors?

I have some instinctive ideas on how I would gain a commission, fundraise, find the creative team and start the long slow process to market, but I would be ‘Jack’ with a handful of beans I think, and the giant would lie within bastions of venue management and Arts Council’s funding, a terrifying prospect of a Giant even for this old granny! In the meantime I am busying myself in the more unwieldy world of writing; working on a prequel Pink Granite soon to be published. Maybe the next blogpost will be about that.  Thanks for reading. Here’s a taster of what we did in Salford.

Notes and References

[1] https://www.newadelphitheatre.co.uk/event/tapp-fest-2/

[2] https://www.salford.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/theatre-and-performance-practice

[3] https://www.salford.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/technical-theatre-production-and-design

[4] http://carranwaterfield.triangletheatre.co.uk/

[5] https://carranwaterfield.co.uk/product/redhair-and-daffodilfriend-2022/

[6] TaPP student Lucy Ryan’s evaluation

[7] ibid

[8] Email from programme leader about her children’s responses

[9] Reader’s review extract

[10] ibid

[11] My last black box creation was my solo piece The House (2015)

[12] Link to the triangletheatre page

[13] Joged Amerta Movement