Fairies spotted in Stratford!
If you’ve spotted fairies flitting about Avonbank Gardens or seen a dolphin or two on the river – do not worry, you haven’t gone mad, yet. Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Slung Low theatre company have set up a Fairy Portal Camp by the RSC, and any magic occurring in the area is deliberate and no cause for panic.
The company are holding events everyday and all day this week – there’s no need to book and all events are free. Join them for singing, dancing and delicious free food.
On Saturday their ambition is to open the portal to the fairy world during their finale ceremony (tickets required).
Meanwhile, Slung Low artistic director, Alan Lane, pictured right, tells Gill Sutherland all about it and how they need everyone’s help to create the magic.
How are you creating the fairy portal? There are 20 of us building a camp — we will go and live in the grounds of the RSC for just over a week. While we are there the main body of our work will be to create the ceremony designed to open the portal to the fairy world. Each day we deliver a cabaret-style show in the park, which also operates as a research and development process to create the perfect ceremony. Then on the Saturday night, 25th June, we pull it together into a great ceremony that’s focused around an Indian feast.
How much of it is preconceived? The camp is created by a wonderful designer called David Farley. He’s pulled together a space that is both practical, where people eat and sleep, and a space that is also ceremonial; with rings of fire, flags and stuff. And because we also cook for the audience, we need to create a field kitchen good enough to prepare food for 120 everyday. We also have a number of boats involved in the show, so we’ve been making them. But the actual performance, the words that are being said and the dances that are being danced, have not been devised yet.
Do you have assigned roles? We are a company of players, so we all pitch in, but we are also assigned areas of responsibility, and so, for instance, mine is food — me and my co-director Lucy, are the chefs. The food is the tastiest and nicest food that we can cook for 110. We do have a wonderful wood-fired pizza oven that we are looking forward to using. One nice touch is that there will be a herb garden which celebrates the herbs that are mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays — we are using them to cook. There’s a sense of play to all of this.
What projects have you done that are similar? Last year we created a fire-laden Camelot in Sheffield. At the heart of that production we had 180 people from the community helping us. So that sense of working together, and singing together, creates a magical power, and that’s what we are all about.
So the audience help create it all? Yes, absolutely. It’s magic. As many Shakespeare plays contest, theatre at its best is magic. Magic can only be performed if everyone is involved. If you are doing something as powerful and as unlikely as opening up the fairy portal, we are going to need all the help we can get.
RSC audiences are a little reserved when inside the theatre, how are you going to draw them out of themselves? What Slung Low specialises in is creating audience experiences that feel like adventures, so if people ever left any of our productions feeling like they’ve done something awkward then we would have fundamentally failed. The idea is that people come and feel heroic and adventurous in the structures that we’ve created. We find that theatre audiences also have a lot of fun when they are asked to behave outside their normal parameters.
Finally, do fairies exist? Yes, definitely. I hope so anyway, because if we open the fairy portal to the other world and there are no fairies there I’m going to be incredibly disappointed.
The Slung Low camp will be open everyday from now until Friday, 24th June, from 11am to 5pm; then from 5.30pm to 6.30pm there will be a Rash Dash Fairy Rave (basically dancing around a fire), followed by dinner at 7pm and an evening performance at 8pm. The grand finale to the week is The Ceremony on Saturday, 25th, at 8pm. All events are free but tickets must be booked for The Ceremony via the RSC box office.
