NTS Transform Moray

1 May 2009 in Dance & Drama, Moray

Don’t Stop the Carnival

KENNY MATHIESON reports on the early stages of the Transform Moray project

The National Theatre of Scotland’s NTS Learn team has launched three major new projects in their Transfrom series in the Highlands & Islands. The community-based projects wil take place in Caithness, Orkney and New Elgin in May and June.

Transform Moray brings a number of professional theatre artists to take up residence in the area and work with local groups as well as pupils from Elgin High School. It’s the first time the Company has visited the area since The Elgin Macbeth in 2007.

The project, directed by Graham McLaren and subtitled The Carnival of Unfortunate Stories, will use the words, stories, songs and skills of the people of Elgin, and will culminate in two public performances on 11 and 12 June in the legendary mirrored pavilion of the Moulin Rouge Spiegeltent, which is making a special trip to New Elgin for the occasion.

As the National Theatre of Scotland’s Associate Director for Learn, Simon Sharkey has overall responsibility for the Transform projects, and recently finished directing a successful event in Dumfries. “It is a big ask to expect people to get involved in this kind of project, and we can’t just expect it to fall into our lap. It’s up to us to come up with ways of drawing the community into the project,” he explained. “They are a really vital component in the whole thing.”

One local person keen to get involved is office worker Karen Anderson. She felt inspired by the prospect of reaching out of her comfort zone: “I am interested in performing and in singing, but in the past I’ve been nervous about getting up on stage,” she said. “I found the idea of this project very inspiring, and I’m hoping that the chance to take part in it will help to push me beyond that barrier in a more challenging setting.”

Although the involvement of the local community represents an important aspect of all Transforms, much of the project’s energies are focussed on the involvement of pupils from Elgin High School.

Actor Alasdair Satchel – who, with commendable devotion to duty had flown in from Hong Kong via several changes to get there in time for the project’s launch in early May – told me that they he and his fellow artists, Alan Penman and Jennifer Edgar, had begun by working with the students on general exercises.

As Simon Sharkey said, breaking down their resistance also takes a little time, but his experience in Dumfries, where initial blank looks had slowly given way to enthusiastic participation, told him that all would work out in time.

With the project up and running, it will be the turn of Transform Moray’s director Graham McLaren to start gathering all the various ideas into a coherent show, incorporating as much as possible of the participants’ own concepts along the way.

Graham, the founder of the Glasgow-based Theatre Babel, is currently an Associate Artist with the Toronto-based Necessary Angel, and was previously artistic and co-creative director at Perth Theatre. He has created work that runs from totally improvised theatre through to classical drama.

“We don’t have a story yet for this project, but I’m having a good look about the place and getting to know the people and their perceptions, and I’m confident that something good is going to come out of it – we’re just not sure exactly what yet!

“I said before we got here that I was both nervous and excited at the prospect of working with the people of Elgin to make a piece of theatre from their stories and words, and that is still the case. There is an added difficulty in only being here in specific units of time, I suppose – Simon, for example, was able to be in Dumfries pretty much constantly, but I am in and out a lot more.

Arriving to start work on a completely blank canvas is also an unusual challenge for the actors, both in terms of working with students and non-professionals, and in coming into a project where there is nothing there on day one beyond the idea that they will create a meaningful piece of theatre by the middle of June.

Alasdair Satchel said that they were relaxed with that prospect. They were familiar enough with working through a devising process rather than a fixed script in any case, and he was confident that the show would come together as planned. As far as the team are concerned, it is onwards and upwards from here.