PROVOCATION ABOUT JOURNEY’S
What kind of journeys do people make and why do they take them?  Physical journeys of necessity, pleasure, or work, adventure or escape. Think of the t journeys in literature; Canterbury Tales, a Kentish pilgrimage where fellow travellers shared stories; Pilgrims Progress, a journey from this world to that world which is to come. The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy follows the yellow brick road to both find her way home and save Oz from the wicked witch, and on route picks up fellow travellers who help her, but have personal missions of their own, one to gain a heart, another a brain and a third to find courage. The Hobbit, a chosen band on a quest to win a share of treasure guarded by a fearsome dragon. Or think of real, local characters who are likely to have once walked through Happy Valley; would we like to meet our ancestors and hear stories from our own community?

Imagine an audience, not merely witnessing a story being played out before them, but actually taken on a journey, fellow travellers with the actors.  Might they collectively be set a task, or have personal missions of their own, what might they discover, what and who might they meet on the way? what paths do they travel, do they have choices about which route to take?  How do we go about creating a real adventure for them?
Imagine an audience divided into different travelling groups, will they be given a guide, or discover cast members as travellers as they set out? Will each group or indeed individual experience a different journey or story to the others? Where will the journey end? 

In Happy Valley there are many potential performance areas, where scenes can happen, events and rituals can take place, story circles can be created. Most notably there is a large natural amphitheatre. Could this be where the final part of the story is told, and what would that be? Maybe it's the journey's end, if so, where could that be?

This conversation is about gathering ideas that reveal how this unusual performance style might work, how we can both tell a story and involve the audience in the adventure. Could it be that the final outcome in not known to anyone, not even the cast?

DEVISING SESSION NOTES ON "JOURNEYS"
 
Present; Michael and Sonia Lawrence, John Harris, Paul Fulton, Gilly Blaydon, Gill Scott, David Brett, Richard Sylvester, Alison Mackenzie, Julie and Bernie Madden, Sally Sugg, Kate Sargent, MaryJane, Jeremy Woodruff, Jon Oram, Becca Maher. Mark Broad registered his interest but had to leave.

David talked about Nana Tomova a Sussex based storyteller. She is a qualified guide and professional storyteller who takes people across the Sussex Downs to tell her stories.  

Jon suggested play where the audience could be travellers be implicated in the drama. He reminded us that we will have to be flexible in the mechanics of the show because of COVID restrictions. Rather than thinking this as a restriction, perhaps it’s an opportunity to create a theatre experience that engages the audience into conversation, and physical engagement.
There are connections with first world war Belgians refugees in Happy Valley. Also, the Beacon pub housed Jewish refugee children during the second world war. Different destinations, rushing. Encounter images/events on way, Exhibitions in a suitcase. Problem pictures. Tableaux. Refugees take them on a journey. Audience as refugees- stories told to each other. Maybe 3 groups encounter different scenes different strands of a story.  Referred to Kentwell House in Suffolk as potential style – an area of re-enactment, crafts people – a living community in the valley. Canterbury Tales, encounter Inns on your travels, Sweeps cave? Fox hunting took place in Happy Valley audience hide the fox.  The idea of suicide as there are places from where you can jump – audience engaged in persuasion (talking them down) Reference to “wonderful walks” an article Alison discovered.  In the 1890’s there were geological walks, extraordinary descriptive language. In 1975 Rusthall primary school undertook a project called Wonderful walks where they walked around Happy Valley and wrote about it. Flash mob implicating audience actors not in costume.
Audience given a letter to deliver (refrences to Claque Mystery Houses where single audience member is engaged in one-minute theatre experience, where they make decisions.
Sweeps cage possible refreshment area,
An actor/ guide leading people through different experiences, meeting at a central point, experience of place/geography. Audience having independent choices of which paths to take Go down one path you receive a reward, or a negative experience (out of tune violin?).
Meeting figures from history, journeys happy and sad. Searching: “Where is Home” Caves/carvings/sacrifice/mythical energy about the rocks. Graffiti- loves lost/loves found. Murder most foul. Supernatural area -Owls in trees, themed areas; people in the trees. Land art in the trees.
Paths not taken. Do you involve audience. Actors not learning lines, but improvised characters.
Story stations, leader/guide/character. Chest of drawers with ancestral belongings, claimed by characters. The film The Point, starring Wayne Sleep. His character was ostracised and teased. He went on a journey and discovered everyone has a point. An outer and inner journey, bringing all stories together at the end.
Responding to environment. Boarding houses. Moved to Pantiles. William Cobbett. Actors question audience, “why are you travelling?”. A quest, letter in envelope.
Jon described his life changing experience of a little girl during a community play taking his hand and asking why a child in the play was being hanged for stealing bread as he was hungry. How those moments of reaching across the centuries to others like us can be so powerful for example a Jewish refugee child at The Beacon. Where is home?   John Harries knows Peter Cornwell the owner of The Beacon. His son runs a theatre company. They have an amphitheatre in the grounds of The Beacon.  The 101 steps down to the cold baths lead to a No Entry sign. Could we use masks (might be necessary anyway re: COVID). Land Art, Field, Forest and Sky on iPlayer.

SUMMARY:
These notes reflect the meeting as one idea stimulated another so are written in the order or form in which ideas flowed. They can act as stimulus for developing the form of the performance; also a provocation to develop of discover new ideas.
Overall, it seems that there is a feeling for hearing, seeing, witnessing, participating in a collection of stories which come together at the end so there is a sense of unity, a final event that connects all the stories or lives we’ve heard on the journey.

 We have been developing a devised community play project, our second. As with the first it will be in Rusthall, this time in an area called Happy Valley. We have secured an Arts Council Grant to continue developing the devising process and the play is the core of the programme. It develops process we tried the first time round with Legends of the Rocks. You will be able to follow the programmes as it unfolds through the category 'Devising the Legend" on this blog page. The project will be subject to changes due to the COVID pandemic but is designed to be flexible and adjust to changing circumstances. Here is our starting starting point:
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THE PROCESS
The Project is in two distinctive yet dependently connected parts. The first. ‘Paths’ is a heritage project that could stand-alone but is strongly enhanced because it ‘feeds’ ideas and material to the second where they will be re-interpreted and developed to give them greater meaning, purpose and depth.  The second project, a legacy of the first, is The Happy Highway, a promenade Community Plays on and around the paths of Happy Valley on Tunbridge Wells and Rusthall Common.
 
PART ONE
‘PATHS’ A HERITAGE PROJECT
 
Path’s and The Happy Highway has evolved out of identifying needs following a series of projects we’ve undertook over the past 2 years locally and the past 40 years nationally and Internationally.  They are

• Build on the legacy of Rusthall Community Arts (RCA) festival
• Expand the number of Claques, partnerships and strengthening our relationship with our present ones.
• Develop new services and improvements of Claque’s Empty Gallery Heritage projects
• Deepen the experience of community members who are involved in the process of creating community plays.
• Increase our understanding and explore further the process of devising with a community
• Add material to complete “The Art of the Community Play” a book currently being written by Jon Oram.

 
Step One -The Basic Building Block (Preparation)
August - September 2020
Two of Claque’s core principles are inclusivity and community ownership. No one is turned away, we believe everyone has something to contribute and everyone is valued for what they bring.  The community ownership is such that they have considerable input into the development, management and devising of the process and the product and we are looking to expand it further. Over the past two years we have formed a local volunteer conservation group who help keep paths and rocks of the Rusthall Common clearer of bramble, fern and tough to encourage the royal fern, unique to the area, and wild flowers and meadow plants.  We worked in partnership with Rusthall Community Arts to devise and produce Legends of the Rocks, a centerpiece for the biennial festival in 2019. We’ve made a lot of ground establishing support, building networks and developing relationships with venue managers, services, school, clubs, organisations, pubs and shops, the commoners, association and friends of the Commons as well as the warden and his team. With the pause caused by Covid we need to reestablish our connection and get activities moving so we don’t lose energy build over the past three years. There is significantly more to do with developing that work and engaging with new partnerships.
 
The RCA committee was very small and remains small, due to a resistance for people to make long-standing commitments. We know once people get the vision for an idea and experience success they are more likely to stay. The success of Legend of the Rocks on a local level has increased registered volunteers from something in the 30’s to over 200. We will create ‘task teams’ that half clear briefs and distinct targets and that have interest values that suit the interests of the volunteers, who we now know better and can invite to help in areas they would more likely enjoy and excel at.

 In this preparation period we would establish project steering committee, research and devising teams and create platforms for the community to actively engage in dialogue that would include refining the aims, themes and programmed activities, identify resources, participate in devising heritage and theatre products (Exhibitions, the play etc). We also need to work together finding flexible ways to meet the changing situations of the COVID pandemic that is likely to be with us through the whole period of these projects. So in preparing we need to create contingencies for every event so that we don’t cancel activities but offer different ways of delivering activities remotely or maintaining the current government guidance of social distancing. We believe cancelling is soul destroying, but that pre considered alternatives or creative improvised solutions could be surprisingly bonding. We have had considerable successes with online improvised workshops and developing the Empty Gallery café for large group conversations, they are all well and consistently attended and it has developed a supportive atmosphere, we all look forward to them.
 
Step Two - Paths Gathering Material (Creative Preparation)
September - October 2020
The production Team, Steering Committee, RCA, Researchers, Partners and others start the creative process and engagement of the community s early as possible. Through Empty Gallery Café conversations if necessary (and more than likely in this early stage) We start gathering and selecting specific themes, ideas medium of expressions (window exhibition, landscape sculptures of rearranged natural flora, fauna and debris) selecting elements in preparation of composition workshop assignment, out of which the heritage presentation products and the ‘play will be composed. The nature of presentation will also have to have alternative solutions.  The material might include historical research, stories, pictures, objects, sounds, physical actions, text, theatrical conventions, and interactive on-line activities and display platforms. etc.  
 
Step Three - Heritage workshops, provocations, making and presentations.
October - November 2020
To cultivate community ownership, we will commit to allowing and encouraging everyone in having their say and being heard we will establish a deliberate policy of not over defining, and mostly not defining at all either the subject nor the mode and medium of presentation. In order to maintain the focus on the central focus of paths in context of heritage will set parameters on the content.  Projects will need to be responses to material derived from collaboratively researched and discussed ideas around ‘Paths’ gathered out of the research, Café conversations, and devising workshops.  The are other obvious parameters such as budgetary considerations, practicality and, essential at this time, maintaining covid safe working situations in line with government advice.
 
We are developing what we are calling ‘provocations’ to help keep us ‘on subject’, provoke creative thinking, charge conversations and challenge preconceptions.  A provocation around Paths might suggest walking around the paths of the Common and the village in small groups, or sending individuals out with a camera to take a maximum of ten photo’s of sites that inspire them as potential venues or subjects of a presentation; they might offer creative ideas of what could happen in them.  Ideas will be shared on line. If group gatherings are legally allowed a number of people might tour together and spark off each other.  We will gather notes and illustrated drawings of Empty Gallery Café group conversations. And provocation papers with lines of verse, headings, and questions. Heritage walks and talks; on line on talks or virtual walks if necessary can inspire conversation as can stories of personal stories of life’s paths
 
Covid requires a flexible, improvisational and creative approach. As we are in a world of fluctuating rules we may have to establish projects quickly to realise them under the rules existing at any give time. Workshop dates can be preset to allow people to plan their lives to attend but there would have to be alternative methods of running them. We will have a collection point or delivery for material if people have to work at home. Indoor venues may remain questionable, in which case weather may be an issue but less so up until end of September. It will require patience and generosity but working collaboratively can still be rewarding. We are finding it so. Setting up displays in open spaces, shop windows, in store, in our gardens, in and around the paths. In and on our cars, on what we wear, on our face-masks. We have to be open to unexpected solutions. We had a successful Heritage project in the City of London with exhibitions in a suitcase; perhaps we could do similar in shoeboxes, an item associated with walking paths.
 
HAPPY HIGHWAYS
Happy Highways is a Community Play informed by Paths Heritage Project. Throughout Paths we have been investigating the community and our individual past and present, and or dream and fears about our future in relation to the paths we have taken and could take.  Individuals and small groups will have already presented some of the material through exhibitions, rituals and other forms; some of these events may have involved theatrical elements.  Now we gather together as many people from as broad a spectrum of the community as possible and ask them to work collaboratively on the ambitious task of creating a work of art in terms of their community. 
 
 THE HAPPY HIGHWAYS
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content;
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
AE Houseman
 
Happy Highways is a Community Play informed by Paths Heritage Project. Throughout Paths we have been investigating the community and our individual past and present, and or dream and fears about our future in relation to the paths we have taken and could take.  Individuals and small groups will have already presented some of the material through exhibitions, rituals and other forms; some of these events may have involved theatrical elements.  Now we gather together as many people from as broad a spectrum of the community as possible and ask them to work collaboratively on the ambitious task of creating a work of art in terms of their community. 
 
 Improvisation and Devising Workshops (Preparation)
November-December 2020
The Paths project will have done much of the creative preparation of collecting provocations to stimulate devising workshops, we may want to search out more as the devising becomes more specific but we will have plenty to start.  One of the gifts of devising is the way in which it challenges us to become authentic collaborators, to work with the spirit of generosity. If a group is working together, listening to each other, not worrying about power and control, the work is usually fantastic. Improvisation workshops give people techniques to help them work generously. One key to composition work is to do a lot in a little time. When we are not given time to think or talk too much wonderful work often emerges; what surfaces does not come from an analysis of ideas, but from our impulses, our dreams, our emotions. Constructive but exquisite pressure comes out of an environment where forces lean on the participants in a way that enables more, not less, creativity.  
 
We now have twenty improvisers from the community and Claqueur Impro Theatre to help us. The community group has been attending weekly workshops since Legend of The Rocks and Claqueur have eleven years experience
 
 Step Four - Composition Workshops 
January -February 2021
Albeit Legends of the Rocks was Claque’s fiftieth community play it was the first one they have fully devised with a community.  I have devised with professional companies and smaller groups but co-ordination upward of 80 different points of view is a challenge to say the least. It depends on everyone understanding and accepting that the play can’t deliver so many views without confusion, nor are they agit-prop vehicles for personal causes. Challenging plays pose more questions than give answers. Characters, however can and do express a range of views and it’s only the involvement of people from a broad church that can deliver honest representation of the community. The world is polarised now more than in any time I remember, it’s a feature of Rusthall and Tunbridge Wells like everywhere else. Conflicting hard held views spawns an unhealthy side of tribalism, one aspect of which is we neither side listening to ‘opposing views. Acknowledging our differences and searching for points in common is an aspect of devising process, and paradoxically in my experience it has a bonding effect; it can surely therefor help heal divisions in the community too.
 
I want to bring the community deeper into the process of creating a performance from start to finish by exploring devising on an unrestricted scale through improvisation and composition. “Devising” is commonly a process in which all members of the production team from actors to technicians develop a show collaboratively; we want to open it further to the whole community, partnering groups, schools and local organisations. Opportunities to input into the composition of the play will be through composition workshops both open to public and customised to specific groups involved in arts and educational activities (music, performance, arts and crafts, dance, film, poetry, writing, literature, heritage and history, environment and conservation etc).
 
Alongside workshops are other activities to provoke conversation and ideas. The activities include tours of the rocks, photographic search for faces and creatures, workshops in prop, mask and paper costume making, performance, and singing.
 
Step Five - Present and Discuss (Composition)
March - April 2021
The different workshop groups perform their compositions to each other one after the next with no commentary in between. Then the feedback for each composition focuses on the positive innovations, articulating what is useful to the production. A semblance of a script or a running order emerges from these discussions.
 
Step Six- Construction and Rehearsals (Production Period)
May- July 2021
With Legends the eight-week rehearsal period began with an outline script, here we aim to leave more room for improvisation, parts will be left open to development and change. Decisions about costumes and masks will be more a part of the devising process, so they influence and inspire the creation of a character.. Under present conditions with regard Covid we couldn’t do an outdoor play with a seated audience, it would certainly limit numbers involved and audience size, and performing at such close quarters, especially singing wouldn’t happen. We must assume things could be the same so in the general preparation and planning we need to have a picture in our mind of what a performance in present conditions could look like. I have prepared a covid performance provocation page to get people thinking in these terms from the start.
 
We are limited in the numbers we can work with indoors so we have to rethink the Design workshop, a central design studio may not be practical. We will have to think of making in several and various environments and se where we can store images made at home, in our gardens or other outdoor spaces. Storage may be the one space we could use and it has to be found. ‘
 
Scenes can rehearsed in small groups, as can elements produced by different entities and groups (Djembe Drummers, Rock Choir etc) can be rehearsed separately and brought together with other parts of the production as rehearsals progress. The final rehearsal stage runs into the summer so we can use the performance spaces as much as possible. In the final week of rehearsal all elements are brought together for full cast calls. Limiting time is a deliberate and valued as part of the creative process.
 
Step Seven
THE PERFORMANCE
July - August 2021
The specifics of the performance will emerge through Composition and rehearsal, we deliberately stat with a blank stage so the community is an authentic collaborator in creative process. We do, however have certain parameters in place to fulfill social, educational, artistic, and community objectives.
 
The content of will be inspired by ‘place’; the Rusthall rocks, the performance venue, the location - Denny Bottom, history, the imagined drawn from folk tale and oral storytelling traditions. The performance will certainly include elements that reflect the skills and interests of the participants and partnership groups so we can determine there will be lots of music: drumming, string band, choirs and likely chorus. The performance is site specific so becomes are stage, set and backdrop. The artist groups involved will determine the props, likely to involve backpack puppetry, masks and painted banners.  There will elements of dance and physical theatre. Parts of the event will be improvised.
 
Paths’ was inspired by the limits of Covid which is why Happy `Valley seems more appropriate space for performance, there are various circular routes, great performance areas for individual and small groups and a potential amphitheater site. This requires small groups, distancing and an audience who encounter theatre as they walk in ‘bubble groups’
 
The performance style will reflect Claque’s wider agenda related to exploring the concept of the Social Actor, an idea born out of the Community Play and the actor’s relationship with the audience. Happy Highways as part theatrical walk will add a dimensions and ‘implicating the audience. It will be a personal experience for each audience member because their encounters with performance will be unique to tht moment they meet each other.
 
The process of composition is about involving the community actor in the ‘making’ of the play. In the same vein the performance will attempt to make theatre a more ‘social event’ by various means such as: Implicating the audience in the drama, giving the audience a performance role, involving the audience in ritual, incorporating social one to one dialogue; consulting the audience; allowing the audience to determine the direction of the play- such as passing a verdict, include a meal, social dancing or singing. There may well be post play event at the Toad Rock, the rues allowing.   
 
The performance dates are as yet unconfirmed; they are likely to be mid to late July or in early August. We have much do in preparation, finding funding, raising monies and support in other ways.. The performance will be no more than 1hour 30min, but may will be staggered with audiences starting a walk for instance at different times. We anticipate a local cast of around 80.  The audience size is so much dependent on Covid is an area that will comfortably take an audience of 250-300 standing and/or seated on the ground. We have taken a conservative estimate of audience as being between 160 and 250 per show.