Footsbarn

Cornish pasty with a French flavour

The story of Oliver Foot and John Paul Cook founding a company in Cornwall in 1971, away from London and its theatres, seeking out ‘non-theatre audiences’, ² performing in ‘schools and pubs in winter, village squares, streets and fields in summer: [with the] central vocation […] to create interest in the theatre in a region where nothing of the kind existed’, has already been told. ³ Described by Foot as ‘a simple travelling company based on Shakespeare’, Footsbarn engaged and re-engaged with a core repertoire down the decades: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first produced in 1976, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, medleys such as Incomplete Plays or Shakespeare Celebration. Pyramus and Thisbe found their way into Circus Tosov in the 1980s.

Both Cook and Paddy Hayter, the current artistic director (who joined Footsbarn in 1973), had studied mime with Jacques Lecoq at his Ecole Internationale de Mime et de Théâtre, in Paris. They brought to the company Lecoq’s kinetic conception of theatre, which combines le jeu (play/playfulness), disponibilité (openness/availability) and complicité (togetherness), embodies text in mime and movement (‘tout bouge’, ‘everything moves’) and explores the dynamics of space. ⁴ Director Darren Tunstall has described this approach as an ‘act of transposition’, that

may involve intercultural strategies of borrowing or adapting, if not the totality of a theatrical form (e.g., Noh Theatre), then perhaps an aesthetic, a style or a series of tropes from another context. The obvious dangers of exploitative cultural appropriation in this approach are to some extent offset by eclecticism – the collision or blending of aesthetic elements, a feature that marks many productions emerging out of the Lecoq tradition. ⁵

Back in the 1970s, this way of thinking and living theatre was attuned to a context of shifting aesthetics, at least off the mainstream stages:

After the hard-edged radicalism of the 1960s there was a softening of artistic, if not political, stance. Popular entertainment and clowning, which had been despised by the performance artists, now became a fashionable pursuit for well-educated performers.…This change was accompanied by a shift of artistic activity away from the cities into the countryside. ⁸

Over the decades, Footsbarn has done just that, seeking to convey emotion in a celebration of togetherness, onstage and off, that implied embracing all art forms, an approach reinforced through touring and adapting to new audiences. ¹¹ Productions were – and still tend to be – fashioned by illusions of improvisation, commedia dell’arte, movement and mime, music and song, with the occasional use of film and video. A central feature to their performance vocabulary remains the use of circus (trapezists, acrobats) and props that play on verticality (ladders, poles) and fluidity (swings, veils, swathes of cloth). Puppets engage with (human) players. The Tempest – first staged in Avignon in 2004 and revisited in 2012–13 as Indian Tempest – provides a fine example of their multifaceted approach and a constant reengagement with a Shakespeare play that reflects ongoing creative exploration, new influences and changes in the cast. Both in the 2004 production and the revival, sails were also tents and canopies behind which actors performed in ombre chinoise and the banquet scene was brought on stage by all sorts of supernatural creatures. Music was an integral part of the production. Larger-than-life marionettes represented the fertility goddess, which contrasted in the 2012–13 revival with the doll-sized Miranda and her father, whom the actor who went on to play Prospero placed in a toy basket which served as a boat. In the 2004 production, Ferdinand was a puppet; in 2012–13, he was performed by the French, Bosnian-born actor and singer Haris Haka Resic who serenaded Miranda in French and was dressed as Jack Sparrow.

The lure of the south: Clashing cultural politics

‘Voyage is a key metaphor in Lecoq’s approach’, Rick Kemp notes. ¹² The urge to explore other horizons and engage with new audiences was there before Thatcher became Prime Minister. As Hayter recalls, ‘We didn’t come to France just to get away from Margaret Thatcher’s politics. We dreamt of travel, free circulation, removing geographic and social borders.’ ¹³ Nonetheless, in the wake of her appointment, even established companies felt the pinch. ¹⁴ Viewing the context from a broader perspective, a European Parliament report on street artists attached political significance to Footsbarn’s move:

In Great Britain, a thriving outdoor theatrical tradition was whittled almost entirely away with the exceedingly Conservative Government of Mrs Thatcher. Funding cuts forced companies to collapse entirely or move to France, Holland and Belgium, where street performance was welcomed and encouraged. There still remain a large number of performers of British origin in and around Amsterdam (working alongside Dutch and Belgian artists) and in France (working around Footsbarn, a Cornish company who ‘dramatically’ left England in the 1980s). ¹⁵

Unsurprisingly, the artistic and financial dire straits of Conservative Britain made Footsbarn look across the Channel, to Socialist France. Between 1981 and 1993, President François Mitterrand pushed the culture ministry’s budget up from 0.48 per cent to 1 per cent of public expenditure. ¹⁷ The Culture Minister, Jack Lang, encouraged bottom-up forms of artistic expression. This outlook was the perfect fit for Footsbarn’s ethos, as their 1992 promenade performance of Romeo and Juliet clearly indicated. It was set in the garden and colonnade of the Palais-Royal, which houses the Culture Ministry, a short distance from the Comédie-Française; masqued figures led spectators through the garden and the façade served for the balcony scene, in – literally – a spectacular encounter between a prestigious site of French culture and street arts.

The government’s cultural outlook was matched by its policy: It recalled the 1936 Front Populaire government’s encouragement of emerging entertainment industries, with the creation of a special status for film technicians and operators, the régime salarié intermittent, later extended to practitioners. It aligned itself with the ‘culture populaire’ ethos that was promoted after the Second World War as a factor in the reconstruction of France – to which Jean Vilar contributed by taking his company, the Théâtre National Populaire into working-class areas and launching the Avignon Festival in 1947, which opened with his production of Richard II. ¹⁸ The year (1981) when Footsbarn performed Hamlet at Avignon was rich in Shakespeare; on the bill were King Lear (directed by Daniel Mesguich), Richard III (directed by Robert Sturua), The Comedy of Errors (directed by Zinovii Korogodski) and Titus Andronicus (directed by Bruno Boëglin). That same ethos inspired, in 1986, the creation of the Printemps des Comédiens in nearby Montpellier, now France’s second-largest festival after Avignon. ¹⁹

For Footsbarn, the invitation to perform at Avignon came through Philippe Tiry, director of the state-funded Office National de Diffusion Artistique, the national body which provides financial support for foreign companies invited to perform in France. Having seen their Hamlet in England, Tiry recommended the company to Bernard Faivre d’Arcier, the Festival’s director from 1980 to 1984. ²⁰ He also helped Footsbarn create an Anglo-French-Italian King Lear, which premièred at Asti then moved to Avignon in July 1983. ²¹ Lang also supported the ‘extraordinary adventure’ of the Mir Caravan in 1989: Footsbarn and seven other European companies totalling 180 people and representing 26 nationalities set off from Moscow in a convoy of some 130 vehicles, finishing in Paris six weeks before the Berlin Wall came down. ²² That same year, Footsbarn settled in a farm, La Chaussée, on the outskirts of Hérisson, a village of 650 inhabitants in the Massif Central, with, to quote Hayter, ‘a history of theatre – there are two or three groups living in the village – we have never found anywhere else the strong contact we have here, open and generous’. ²³ That is where the company still live, make their sets, props, masques, puppets and costumes, rehearse and organize events, enjoying what Hayter calls ‘the pleasure of working with small communities, and the joy of long journeys’.

The French Culture Ministry subsidised Footsbarn’s English tour in 1991. Audiences were enthusiastic, but the cool reception from theatre critics – ‘the reviewers are calling these people [the audiences] stupid. They’re saying that they’re enjoying something that’s rubbish’ ²⁴ – contrasted with Avignon a decade earlier, where Hamlet was ‘considered a breakthrough in the freedom you could take with a great poet’. ²⁵ The feeling among members of Footsbarn was that while audiences were responsive on both sides of the Channel, the divide between the cultural establishments was there, with ‘really very little contact’ between ‘London and Paris, London and Berlin, London and Rome, London and Madrid’. ²⁶ France, henceforth, was really home.

Fringe to fringe: In the steps of Molière

Besides the Avignon and Montpellier festivals, Footsbarn has performed for audiences across the south of France, in an arc of towns that overlaps with those where Molière and his company toured between 1647 and 1657; this tradition of touring theatre enjoyed renewed success in the 1970s with the Tréteaux du Midi. ²⁷ The connection between Footsbarn and Molière, however, is not merely geographical or economic. ²⁸ Molière explored reception through multilingual scenes that drew on regional dialects. Footsbarn produce Molière, often alongside Shakespeare. Their 1998–99 season programme offered three shows – The Winter’s Tale, Molière’s Don Juan and a medley of tales, L’Arbre à Palabres, with the following comment: ‘Footsbarn loves Shakespeare, but, like a fickle lover, invites Molière and Don Juan under the canvas for a last banquet’. Molière’s sense of pacing and critique of human foibles held evident kinship for Footsbarn, and Hayter himself has said, in a personal interview, that he likes to imagine himself performing until he drops dead on stage, ‘like Molière’.

In 2017, the company blended a comédie-ballet, Le Mariage forcé, and a farce, La Jalousie du Barbouillé, into a single show, Retouche Molière (Mingling with Molière) for their Anglophone and international audiences (at Brno and Prague in February 2018). The name recalls their previous Ne Touchez pas à Molière [Don’t Touch Molière] in 1996, which, the story goes, was the company’s response to audiences who enjoyed their Shakespeare but told them to keep their hands off the French classics. Possibly one of the best tributes Footsbarn has received may be a playgoer’s comment after a performance of Don Juan: ‘Bravo! Molière would have loved to know you! You perpetuate his spirit, his perception of theatre.’ ²⁹

Experiencing theatre as ‘a way of life as well as a way of work’ has conditioned Footsbarn’s approach to touring and choice of venues. ³⁰ Travelling with families, children and a school bus and performing in a tent that can seat anything between 250 and 600 people requires a lot of space, hence their preference for locations that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France factfiles refer to as ‘extra-muros’. ³¹ Letters exchanged between their administrator and the director of the Avignon Festival in 1981 address issues such as a site to set up camp, access to running water and electricity. ³² ‘In the idyllic setting of the grounds of the [Montpellier] Château d’O, on the fringe of the town’, which hosts the Printemps des Comédiens Festival, Footsbarn staged The Winter’s Tale under canvas in 1998 and in the open air the following year, with ‘the trees provid[ing] a natural back-drop to the…round stage’. ³³ They have also performed in the sunken Grand Bassin, a gigantic water reservoir dating from the seventeenth century, a unique performance site which fascinated Peter Brook, ³⁴ and which Florence March describes as ‘a mineral O somewhat reminiscent of the Shakespearean wooden O and of the circus rings and tents scattered across the park’ during the Festival. ³⁵ Such organic harmony may explain why Footsbarn returned regularly between 1993 and 2010, performing to enthusiastic audiences. ³⁶

Work from the fringes and an international outreach have always been in keeping with Footsbarn’s social and aesthetic location ‘in the margins of conventional theatre’. ³⁷ For Odette Michel, co-founder (with Daniel Bedos) of Montpellier’s Printemps des Comédiens, the kinship between Footsbarn and Le Théâtre du Soleil, which Ariane Mnouchkine founded in the mid-1960s at the Cartoucherie of Vincennes on the edge of Paris is clear. ³⁸ Heirs to Lecoq, both have opted for a collective approach that favours the risks of experimentation, the ‘edge’ over the centre – one difference being that Footsbarn has long worked without a director. ³⁹ Footsbarn, who performed (in their tent) at the Cartoucherie in 2008, and Théâtre du Soleil also share a taste for cross-generic experimentation, travel, international casts and the exploration of Shakespeare through art forms from other cultures, particularly India. Both Mnouchkine’s Une Chambre en Inde (2016–17) and Footsbarn’s Indian Tempest (staged at Villeneuve-Lès-Avignon in 2012 and at the Globe in 2013) were multilingual productions, incorporating Indian performers, practices and styles. This, however, was no novelty: In his review of Footsbarn’s 1983 King Lear at Avignon, Jacques Nerson drew analogies between Footsbarn and Théâtre du Soleil in the use of masques, a soundscape that drew on percussion instruments, and a frontal, stereotyped style of acting inspired by commedia dell’arte and oriental theatre. ⁴⁰ In their approach to theatre, Footsbarn displays a kinship with a tradition that ranges from Molière to Mnouchkine.

Co-writing the performance with the audience

The round or apron stage is a feature of Footsbarn shows, which also take place in the air, with ladders, ropes and trapezes. This enables the performers to reach out to the public and draw it into the show, an inclusive process that Hayter describes as ‘shar[ing] a performance with the audience, rather than perform[ing] it for them’. The ‘blank canvas…[from which] anything can emerge’ ⁴¹ is propitious, as is a space like the Domaine d’O, ‘an empty space, a hole that needs to be filled in by the festival-goer’. ⁴² In Don Juan, for instance, the spectators were pulled into the story, becoming the villagers who hounded the protagonist: ‘In the beginning, a tent, a round stage, an arena. In the darkness, a rumour: the villagers pursue that devilish Don Juan in the moonlight.’ ⁴³

Connectedness extends beyond the shows with Footsbarn. Travelling en famille means that Footsbarn may stay a fortnight or more in a given place. At the Domaine d’O, where they mingled with other companies, they met young people from neighbouring districts, many of whom had never been to the theatre before, and invited them to lend a hand or join in workshop sessions. Performers thus become ‘a part of “them”’, to paraphrase Brook, in a position to ‘celebrate’ with the audience, ⁴⁴ all the more so when 20 per cent of patrons are children, as at the Printemps des Comédiens. ⁴⁵ ‘This is very much a family festival and there are many small children in the audience’, writes Angela Maguin. ⁴⁶ Playgoers agree: ‘Congratulations to this wizard troupe that conjures up dreams for young and old alike’. ⁴⁷ That families feel welcome may also be because Footsbarn children are involved from an early age, whether in handing out cushions or performing. This informed their production of Romeo and Juliet (1993), with the programme noting upfront ‘What’s left after that tragic suicide: dead children, nothing more!’, ⁴⁸ and gave the performance a unique quality:

Romeo and Juliet are played by children of members of the Company and the use of the ‘ombre chinoise’ technique admirably conveys the strength of the physical passion of [the dance and bedroom] scenes while retaining their child-like purity. ⁴⁹

Babel magic

‘A nomadic existence gives you freedom and it tests you. Everywhere you go you have to attract an audience’, says Hayter. ⁵⁰ Over the decades, the company has embraced multiple nationalities, languages and cultures (no less than ten are listed in the 1993 Romeo and Juliet programme), as well as a whole range of performing arts and crafts, circus and mime, that have been further enriched by contacts with players and cultures around the world. Their artistic agenda is anchored in the conviction that actors perform best when speaking their own language:

We solved the problem of the language through the actors’ performance, they are more comfortable with their own language, the body follows suit, and the audience follows the body movements. The language barrier does not exist as far as we are concerned. ⁵¹

The French reception’s focus on the various languages of performance that help to overcome a sense of linguistic alienation contrasts with the attention to verse delivery and language that seems inevitable in an English-speaking environment where audiences receive relatively little exposure to international Shakespeare. One exception is Kayla Clibborn, who writes:

Footsbarn is well known for its fusion of a number of languages and performance styles, and Indian Tempest is certainly no exception to its acclaim. Shadow play, traditional costumes and a perfect arrangement of Indian instruments woven through Footsbarn’s unconventional yet joyous theatrics, pay a wonderful homage to Shakespeare’s last work. ⁵⁶

Whither next?

By February 2018 (when this article was finalized), Footsbarn had taken Mingling with Molière to the Czech Republic, in a tour that combined the show with an exhibition and workshops. The show had travelled successfully to Ireland the previous summer. In May 2016, three generations of Footsbarners had celebrated their 45th anniversary at Hérisson, under pouring rain that recalled their tent-flooded beginnings. In the summer of 2015, the company had experienced its first-ever setback in Avignon, where, at the request of the local authorities, it had set up its tent for 3 months in the ‘extra-muros’ district of Saint-Chamand, to play Incomplete Works and Cuckoo’s Nest and run drama workshops. The immersive experience was marred by petty thefts and the slashing of their tent; some parents discouraged their children from attending the workshops, and audiences stayed away. ⁶³ But there were also uplifting encounters and the difficulties highlighted more than ever before the need to reach out beyond the circle of festivalgoers to culturally and economically deprived areas. On his appointment as the director of the Avignon Festival in 2014, Olivier Py had spoken of the need to ‘decentralize’ the Festival over a radius of 3 km and break through the ‘symbolic barriers’ formed by the concentric circles of the medieval city walls and the ring road.

The company is currently some 12 strong, roughly the number who left Britain, with young performers working alongside senior members and an international mix. Some of the children have grown up and gone on to create their own shows. True to its collective spirit, Footsbarn contributed to the creation of the Centre international pour le théâtre itinérant (International Centre for Travelling Theatres), an informal network of some 60 travelling companies based in 10 countries on 3 continents. ⁶⁴ The ethos of transmission is still there but cutbacks in subsidies have meant less money for Footsbarn and other companies. ⁶⁵

Footsbarn’s story is still in the writing, and as a case study, it raises artistic and new political issues for European companies that offer alternative approaches to the classics. Some questions at the forefront of future work include: How sustainable are art forms based on renewal and evanescence? Does a commitment to transmission impair or generate artistic renewal? To what extent are security issues and fear of migrants jeopardizing touring? Travelling across borders with an international cast is becoming more difficult and a tightening up of safety regulations complicates the logistics of setting up a tent or using a fleet of ageing lorries. Can ‘playfulness’ and a ‘festive celebration of theatre’ survive in a period overshadowed by budgetary restrictions? While financial tribulations have always been part of Footsbarn’s way of life, new times require new solutions: The company is looking toward private sponsoring, through a non-profit organization, Les Amis de Footsbarn, and crowdfunding. ⁶⁶

In his ‘Letter’ to Lecoq, Simon Murray lists Footsbarn among ‘the diverse companies’ that have survived from the 1980s: ‘It is…remarkable just how many companies have kept going, and often without the security of regular grant income. Such longevity from the 1970s or 1980s testifies to resilience, a commitment of spirit, an enduring belief in collaboration’. ⁶⁷ Players, Hayter considers, have no choice, but to go on:

Footsbarn haven’t stopped for over 40 years…we work to avoid stagnation whenever possible…He [Lecoq] was an incredible teacher…but he had no preconceived plan for his students, except to keep moving and to continue with the journey, their journey. ⁶⁸