In development…

BEAR Project

(for info about Gabrielle’s current and forthcoming collaborations with other companies click here)

Bear

At the moment we’re looking at bears!

Like all our work, it starts slowly. We’ll spend months looking at bears first - live where possible, and we’ll collect available footage too. Funnily enough the brilliant wildlife documentaries that are made these days are not always that useful for us, as they often speed the animals up or slow them down, and there’s often music overlaid which prevents us hearing the sounds- those that the animal makes and those of its environment. So we often end up using bits of amateur video that people post on Youtube - or, even better, our own footage which we can let run for longer.

We don’t impose stories from the outside - everything comes from the animal. The lockdown period during the pandemic and Brexit have presented challenges, of course, but we’ve been developing work remotely from each other and joining together electronically for regular sessions from three different countries. The bear is a big active animal, though, and as soon as we were allowed, we moved outside and into a big clear studio spaces to enable the bears to really move in an uninhibited way, and to interact. Both the Omnibus theatre, London and The Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, supported us with space during liftings of lockdowns so that we could come together to work. These were glorious moments of discovery back in the rehearsal room.

We’re particularly grateful to Arts Council England who have already helped the project indirectly through the Develop Your Creative Practice funding strand. We are also grateful to Theatre Alive! for giving us our first chance to grow this piece outside the UK. Click here for footage of our ‘Bears in Libraries’ foray in the Municipal Library of Kalamata, Greece, December 2021.

We’re also really grateful to the bears at Wildwood Trust, Herne, Kent. Theirs is an extraordinary story!