It was Jane Riddiford who introduced me to the edgelands.
Jane is a remarkable, kind woman who runs Global Generation. Part of her genius is in setting up wild, organic spaces in the shadows of new building work. She takes leftover waste from the building sites and uses it to build flower beds and community spaces. She grows vegetables in skips so she can move them when the developers arrive and take over her space.
Jane told me once, in a yurt surrounded by new builds in Kings Cross, that the edgelands are the spaces in which two different environments meet. The town and the countryside. The river and the river bank. The field and the wood. It is these spaces, she said, that are the most biodiverse.
I have been thinking of edgelands as I navigate the running of a youth theatre almost entirely on Zoom. In our normal world, our work is almost always born and developed in the edgelands - in the break in the middle of a rehearsal when everyone comes alive, or the walk home where thoughts settle and you say what you really mean, the long bus journey to a residential, in a secret look, a missed meaning, a moment of eye-contact, a mistake.
These things don’t exist any more in our work.
Instead we have the hard, non-porous edges of Zoom, where conversations are much harder and only one person can be heard at a time. There is no arrival chat, no end of session hanging around, no gossip. If we have a break everyone disappears onto their phones, or into their kitchens.
Working online has made me look afresh at what we do - the weaving of a play over time through multiple interactions, fragments of conversation, discoveries that are only possible in a room of people interacting together.
I say often that when we make plays it’s like building a dream-catcher - a series of complicated connections between people as they meet source material and each other. Our plays are made out of choices, individual and collective, each one connecting us more deeply to the work, as if we are leaving our DNA on it. This so often happens best in the edgelands - the improvised speech over dinner at Nandos, the microphone left on in a rehearsal room over lunch, a heart-to-heart on the steps outside.
None of this possible in Zoom. On Twitter someone said how Zoom “flattens out the joshing, confirming, sub-convos and makes all dialogue feel like it’s being pulled inexorably along a road within firm parameters.” While this might sound like quite a few productions you’ve seen or been involved in, it doesn’t sound like a play I’d like to make. In fact it creates the very situation we try and avoid most - a dominant adult voice, a single line of enquiry, a call and response approach to making work.
Maybe this is the best we have right now. But in our new-normal, it might be seducing to think that we can save time and money by continuing to do some or all of our work online like this. It’s almost certainly true that tech companies will use the pandemic to shift huge swathes of education online. Why not youth theatre and other artistic processes too?
We must resist this with everything we have. Because plays are not made in rehearsals, they are made in the toilets, the water-break, the unexpected interruption and the chat on the walk home. Zoom doesn’t offer that space. Not for professionals, not for amateurs, and most of all not for young people making plays in which they get to speak up for what they believe in.