Zoe Robinson, from Headlong Theatre will share with you experiences, tips and methods from working on touring production A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction focussing in on how to make theatre design and production more sustainable, from circular methods to creating energy live on stage!
Zoe Robinson, Theatre Producer, Headlong Theatre
Now time for our final how-to session into the world of theater but I’m sure the themes are relevant to lots more event design architecture Community design theater and The Wider culture engagement zo Angelou zo Angelou um Robinson is a creative producer currently at headlong theater leading on Productions playing across the UK most
Recently with the barin co-producer ing a play for the living in a time of Extinction by Miranda roseall a bold experiment in Eco theater making which took the climate crisis headon in process content and form zoi over to you thanks so much Alicia yeah my name is Zoe Angelie Robinson and I’m a
Theater producer working in London at headlong um so I’m going to be talking about reimagining UK theater as a whole in the climate crisis um um I’m going to talk you through what headlong do the type of shows we make and how we make them I’m going to use uh the production that
Alicha mentioned a play for the living in a time of Extinction as a case study to talk you through how we essentially tried to unpick a lot of the traditional ways of theater making and uh really hold um a light up to ourselves and how
We’re do how we can do better I’m going to talk through the challenges we had which weren’t always obvious uh the learnings that we found and how we can move forwards and hopefully some of those things um will uh speak to you and your industries and the way you work um
It’s worth saying that that I feel like the theater industry and the Arts Industries um are still learning maybe still in baby stages compared with um some of the other Industries at the moment in terms of how we reduce our carbon footprint but the thing I know
That I do and headlong does is is Strive to make connections to our audiences wherever we go and it is in this connection through storytelling um in the way that we uh encourage people to ask questions to see things in a new way both on stage and the people working on
Shows backstage that really can Inspire change so when we’re talking about theater I mean both in the way we physically make the shows but also how we experience them and how that might change habits after we’ve seen a show um so headlong what type of work do we make
Uh so I’ve been at headlong nearly two years and we have made six uh mainstage Productions in that time uh I’m just going to take you through some of them uh Karina Karina by Chloe Moss was made uh with and at the lipol Everyman and Playhouse it’s uh an Eco a feminist
Thriller set on a cargo ship grappling with um themes of capitalism uh and saw one female um shipmate amongst her male counterparts um we presented Jitney by August Wilson this was a co-production with leed’s Playhouse and the Old Vic in London and it then went on tour um
Jitney is uh one of August Wilson’s 10 plays in a cycle he wrote um uh looking at black experience in America in the 20th century uh Henry V I realized I haven’t put who wrote Henry V it is of course William Shakespeare that we presented at the S
Wama playhouse at the globe co-produced with them and then we went on toour co-producing with Lee’s Playhouse again and Royal and derngate the sound mon maker is um that beautiful space where everything is lit by candles so that was a really interesting challenge for us um
In how we made that show the final example is actually one that’s showing currently which is a view from the bridge a class by Arthur Miller um chest fesal theater uh and the rose Kingston um so yeah we present new writing and Classics in a new way um
Again to try and connect with audiences in new ways and ask new questions so the reason I showed you those photos was not just to kind of say this is our work but to also look for those similarities and how that plays into our relationship um with climate change so all of these
Productions uh we always aim for a Sleek design with high standards that kind of real quality control um we aim to move uh both kind of emotionally through our work but we are a touring company we’re a leading touring company in this country so the sets have to be durable
They need to be made out of certain materials that can be pulled apart and then put back together often very quickly they need to to be safe with um team members running up and down things that have just been made on that day um we move as well we travel around the
Country so that travel itself and The Way We Tour is obviously going to have an impact on our carbon footprint you will have heard the amount of co-producers I spoke about so headlong are a really small company but we always co-produce with other venues we don’t have a venue ourselves and so that
Relationship is quite key because obviously we need to match the aims and the expectations of the co-producers we’re working with and the um environment that they’re working in and time obviously those Productions and a couple more were made in two years and that gives you a sense of kind of the
Leading time from the point when we go this show is green lit to developing it to designing it to going into rehearsals to making quick changes in a technical period and those things these things that I’ve just gone through you might be seeing the Common Thread means that it
Is quite challenging um when we come up against the obvious crisis we’re in because all of these things kind of shout um not necessarily making steps towards sustainability and so we started thinking what can we do in a big way um to really challenge ourselves and we
Decided to really focus not that we were forgetting about it on other shows but use one show um not to be prescriptive about it but one show to really shout about what could be done and how we could do things differently so we found this play a play for the living in a
Time of Extinction which uh is by Miranda Rose Hall and we read this play and thought this is brilliant this can be the play that is our um that seed for this idea and how we’re going to work differently and as luck would have it casy Mitchell um the renowned director
Who has done so much in sustainable working was working on this show from London but working on a production in Switzerland she was working on Zoom directing a show making this show in a sustainable way and we she was drawing on and furthering her work that she had
Done with a project called sustainable theater and uh she originally conceived uh this project with the support of French choreographer Jerome Bell and theer vidy Loan in Switzerland and we brought Katie in and said look do you want to do this work and do you want to partner with us on
This sort of work in the UK and in London and with someone like ktie Mitchell on board we had a meeting with the barbin and we programmed a week of performances in the barbarin this spring now to give you context again of that time we had that meeting with the barbin
In summer 2021 and the production was on in spr sorry summer 2022 and the production was on this year in um spring 2023 so that gives you that kind of quite um yeah small amount of time to develop your ideas and make something that is that high quality but also
Looking at how we’re working sustainably um so what is this show and why was it going to be the show that we used um to shout about how we could make sustainable theater so the show itself is um one performer um called Naomi who finds herself on stage uh without her
Other performers um and she ends up doing sort of part Ted Talk part standup comedy it’s a a battlecry for how she’s experienced the climate um crisis and she ends up turning um the show into an off-grid show to really show um her relationship with the climate crisis
This now it is a oneperson show but we needed quite a lot of other people because at that point around 10 the show itself goes off grid um sorry if I’m rushing through this um but this is kind of where it gets uh exciting or definitely for me when I was
Experiencing the way that this was worked uh this worked really exciting um so 10 20 minutes in she says this show is going off grid and all the life in the theater go off and you hear as an audience member this were of bikes and
Slowly the lights come on and you see 10 cyclists um powering all the energy you need all the lighting all the sound for the rest of the show and why that I realized and I I think I hadn’t actually realized until I was actually on one of
The bikes during one of the rehearsals and why that was so important is because the audience are are literally seeing the sweat the effort the labor of what it takes to power a show like this on the Barun main stage and the cyclist at the barbaron were all staff members at
The barbon all volunteering and you found yourself sort of watching them during the show and thinking you know they’re putting so much energy into this um and that became part of the drama um and that bike technology was made uh by an incredible company called electric
Pedals down in South London so to give you a sense of what the whole um set looked like you can see uh there that I suppose for a barban mainstage so quite paired back um but still quite arresting um and really effective in terms of what
You’re looking at so you can see 10 cyclists on bikes Fanning out a lead performer in the middle uh BSL interpreter signing to the side of her stage left of her and uh LED Flex Neon Lights um giving pretty much all the lights apart from a couple of others to
The stage in a uh circuit shape to represent that circuit so those two counters at the top that you can see with 393 and 326 that is the uh the wattage counters so how much each side of five bikes are making in any one moment and we had actually predicted
That each um side of the bikes each F each person would make between 50 and 60 watts at any given time but you can see there um just by doing the math that they were making a bit more and actually some of them really went for it at the
End of the show now obviously how much power we had to makeing the show really changed uh the design and what we were playing with so I’ve got a a stat here so usually at the barberon a play consumes 80,000 Watts for lighting and 30,000 watts for sound and for this show
We planned to not go above 500 watts because that’s what we had estimated um that 50 watts per bike that everyone could make so just sort of like let that settle that that amount of wats would normally be what you’d see on a barban main stage in a West End theater and we
Were trying to make a show as gripping with those amounts that amount of energy and I think it was a really exciting Challenge and the way we worked had to really uh really shift so those two things uh the show itself and the way the show was powered were obviously
Really connecting to the audience but how did we shift what we were doing I suppose sort of Backstage and in the making of it now we by no means head long are the first to work on any of this obviously Casey Mitchell has done years on this sort of work but also uh
Organizations like Julie’s bicycle and more recently Theater greenbook which is an initiative a road map created by Paddy Dylan and some other experts across the country on how theater makers theater companies theater venues can work in a structured way to build up how sustainable um their Productions are and
This is a lot of information I can send it around to um anyone who’s interested but this is kind of the cheat sheet I have on the wall and it’s divided into three Baseline intermediate and advanc and those are the three kind of aims you could be um really looking for for each
Of your shows and it breaks it down into um the invitation to make the show production making and how you close the show but simply put the making parameters is what we really focused on for this and for that it is where does all of your materials come from from uh
The socks that some of those cyclists are wearing to um that led Flex we were using to the steel deck and where does all those things go at the end of the show and when you break it down like that it felt like that we had real clear
Parameters for all of our design teams so those three um guideline uh kind of breakdowns in the theater green book Baseline if you’re show has 50% of materials um that have had a previous life and 65% which have a future life you’re going to you’re going to be on
That Baseline level intermediate 75% of your materials have a previous life 80% % have a future life and advanced 100% And 100% now we obviously aimed for 100% on this with how we were making the show um theater can often become very crunchy at the point of uh you’re in Tech you’re
In a dark theater you suddenly realize you need something and you would always often go to ordering it quickly online someone running out to a shop and this happened with actually some of our lighting equipment that we needed uh an adapter and a really key moment to make
All the lights work and we did actually have to buy that new so I think our percentages in the end were around 98% and 100% but I was so amazed um and pleased that we could get get sort of percentages when previously we were probably at that Baseline if not lower with our
Shows um so that’s how we made the show at the baracon but we are a tour ing theater company and we actually know that at least 50% of our carbon footprint on a show goes towards travel moving people uh moving sets around the country um I haven’t done an international tour but
Headlong do and so that would mean moving um around the world now we wanted to build this model based on our standard touring model so venues that we work with we would go to them for a week they would play this show but how would that work in this context
Now Casey Mitchell had worked on a tour in Europe when she was at vidy uh where nothing moves so what does that mean so that means she made the show obviously she was zooming as director from London uh creating this show they made the show in Switzerland uh and then
Other European playhouses picked up on the idea and they would find a director locally a cast member locally their stage manager agement their creative team and they were sent uh digitally guidelines on how to make that bike power um and so that was happening in Europe but we realized quite quickly
That that couldn’t happen here in the UK we uh have lots of relationships with touring venues here and we know that they are um they are on their knees in terms of resources and capacity so are we we’re sort of stretched especially since coid um we don’t have the
Resources the capacity and the time to make that happen in the same way so how could headlong help to curate something where we would still be in touch and still engaging in the same way that we would on a standard tour but on this so what would that mean for us so that
Meant that we would help a touring venue to find an actor contract with them a uh a director cyclist there’s a choir at the end of the show a stage manager their creative team we wanted there to be a shared DNA a shared aesthetic so it seemed like a
Tour that we would normally send on the road so we had lead designers in each department so the design team from London at the baron uh so the set and costume designer the lighting designer the sound designer became lead designers to give advice to the teams running it
On the ground in different places across the UK we made our production manager touring production manager made a a set of touring guidelines um which were updated kept live on a simple Google uh Drive document that as we learned things we added things to them uh we held so
Many Zoom meetings some more successful than others parameter meetings what they were aiming for what their concerns were we had full team meetings with all of the production managers so they could share their learnings they could share what um their concerns were we had lots of design meetings um and all over zoom
And I think um it meant that we could have a lot more of them but like I say I think it’s not necessarily um we found that it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to do to kind of give so many people lots of information which they then had to
Digest we kind of were learning as we went about kind of what to to throw at these different uh venues now time was really important on this because if you think on a normal uh standard tour for us we’re trying to fit um of venue leads Playhouse Bolton octagon Rose Kingston
In exactly week to week so we’re not having to pay actors uh in those in between weeks but on this we could spread it out a bit more we could have the barin a couple of weeks another touring venue a couple of weeks another venue um so this worked on one hand but
I suppose on the other hand there wasn’t that constant um kind of uh like enthusiasm the tour wasn’t constantly running which actually we really felt for the first time um and it’s important to say that a major change was that we did have to send around two flight cases or one
Flight case and a pallet box because like I was saying that kind of resource and that um capacity to make that bike technology uh production managers in this country if a venue has a production manager didn’t have that time so we sent round four uh bike rear wheels because
The touring genes had four bikes um a power box a generator a wattage C and that was sent around um the country in an Eco van so that’s the kind of parameters for the tour where did we go so we went to Belgrade theater centry so
You can kind of see those four bikes there their take on the design they still got that circuit can’t quite see wattage counter in red it’s just hidden by that light um so you can see how they realized it we then went to Shakespeare North which I’m afraid I don’t have a
Photo of we played at new Vic theater in Stoke which was so interesting because this was in the round so you can see the playing space in the middle four bikes around it uh there is a produ a projection screen um yes so actually in belr Coventry they projected onto the
Back wall there um and then new VI Stope they came up with this amazing idea to project um upwards into that uh screen you can see at the top of our screen there uh we played at the drum in Plymouth um which I don’t have a
Production shot from and then we end and I’m sorry this is a bit blurry because these were actually taken by photos on teams of the ground uh this is York Theater Royal and you can see the choir actually there so that shared aesthetic is there you’ve got the um the
Connection that that circuit of light you’ve got those bikes in that fan you’ve got that same um color palette uh of costumes there so what are our challenges and learnings on this so the design um we were having to map the wattage if your lights uh had a big flash you were
Having to think about where um where your sound levels were what your speakers were at you can see how we had to shrink and expand um for each of the different spaces and I think interestingly on a more kind of uh zoomed out note we realized that that
Shared DNA was kind of a constant uh conversation point for us because a designer holds that Authority and by having a lead designer but then somebody trying to lead on the ground meant there was sort of what was it what was in it for the designers on the ground
Creatively if they were given these like really strict parameters and so there was always that back and forth on kind of like how much did we want to give that freedom to the local teams and how much did we want to hold that um that sort of through line um across all shows
So you can see here the model box from the barin um on the left with the 10 bikes and then you can see what we were sending out to the touring venues and how they could set up their um their venues marketing um selling a show uh
Marketing teams are always on me they’re always saying have you got your cast member in we’re always late with that obviously on this we cast brilliant Lydia West in the in the role of gome at baracon but we couldn’t use her face um on tour because that would be false
Advertising so we had to make new uh design images wasn’t really a problem but it meant that we were kind of doing more than we would normally have to do in on that front print material print we sort of thought it didn’t make sense in the context of the way we were working
To ask venues to print flyers print posters uh but actually some of the feedback we got was that venues really relied on that and I think if we had had more in-depth conversations around marketing this show and how we spoke about this show and how we made
Marketing for this show earlier on that would have helped um what do people want from the show we were so excited to see the show and work on this show but I think Katie Mitchell told me that in a conference she was at they had surveyed the audience members and 98% of them
Said that they wanted to ensure theater companies were working sustainably and making work sustainably but only seven % of them wanted to see a show about sustainability and climate change and that was a real kind of light bulb moment for me because I thought well that’s we’ve made this show about
Climate change um and actually does everyone one want to see that when maybe they want to have more escapism in theater but what we did lean on is stories with the cyclist cyclists were from local the local community even staff from the venue and that was a really exciting thing that these were
People who’ never performed on stage and suddenly we’re powering the whole stage so we really focused in on that and that was something the audiences really connected to and finally on challenges and learning getting the team together usually we’d have one director one designer one creative team one set of
Casts but suddenly we were casting for six venues we were bringing in teams for six venues um and there was a really interesting thing with the choir so there’s a choir at the end of the show that come on for a song and we wanted to ensure that that
Was made made up um of diverse uh people different backgrounds because our lead actor was of global majority and we wanted that to kind of reflect in the choir and everyone on stage so we put that as a parameter need to have a diverse choir now obviously outside big
Cities outside London that suddenly became harder one of our other was use uh your car to get to the theater or think about the way you’re traveling again different outside London so we had to you know be more Flex in The Way We Were designing the very team that we were putting
Together um sorry I realize I’m racing through but the final thing I would say is in terms of how we’re moving forwards I’m very aware um in making this show that the way we track our carbon footprint it has to be more than just the making because obviously audiences
Are coming to the theater they’re driving in their cars they’re going out for dinner hats how are we changing what they’re thinking through the theater that we’re making and could we and will we track the whole carbon footprint of what it is to make theater we’re sparking conversation and
That’s what’s I think is so important theater and art for me is about again how do you get people to ask questions of themselves of other people and that is what I want to continue doing with shows that we make um and I think in terms of shows that we produce next year
The final thing I’ll say is that originally I think we thought we were fighting against this model of making shiny theater those beautiful sets um but actually what we were fighting against is making the show look exactly the same every night and I realized that that’s what Netflix does but we’re in
The realm of Live Theater it can be different every night it can be slightly different at each venue and I think when we really leaned into that livess that’s what really kind of open so many doors uh for us thank you so much um for coming and listening to this talk uh
Alicia do we have any questions yes we do thank you so much that was so fascinating um especially like learning more about the bikes as well in that production um so question is from Joe was there any sound design or music that had to be considered EG powering sound
Systems or methods of creating sound yes so we had um a brilliant sound designer called po Clark who had worked with KY Mitchell Lots before um and he actually his whole sound design all the sounds you heard in the show were made from people um uh cycling bikes they were made from
Humans and bikes which was really interesting and then he wrote the song at the end and definitely yeah we had to have all of that thought about how the sound system was powered up and I didn’t say but actually our two operators needed to be on stage because you lose
Power the longer your cabling is so we normally you’d have an operator back behind the audience in a theater but you have them on stage powering and operating that sound on stage another question is more to do with even like um collaborations how do you even get that coming about um how do
You um communicate different designers and um I think also touched on the duration of how long it takes and it’s quite small um what kind of mechanisms or methodologies do you use to kind of um maybe improve that or to refine it so I think it’s about conversation the way
We initially have that kind of invitation to work with designers that we say we’re a company that are really trying to focus on this and I’m definitely learning how to be clear in that sense I think I’m finding we have lots of meetings with co-producers users and we say we’re trying to work
Sustainably and everyone goes yeah because there’s the passion there but I think it’s I see my job as breaking that down what does that actually mean week to week um process topress time frame in rehearsals what are we doing in Tech week what are we doing and I think it’s
About support um yeah time is both short as a whole but also in very quick decisions have to be made and how can we speak through them and think about how can we make them sustainably and is a real push and pull because obviously if you want something to look a certain way
Quite often that means buying something new but giving more time to a designer means that they have more time to think through other possibilities um the theater greenbook have a really interesting thing so in theater you do a white card meeting um when initial designs are made and then a
Final design and theater greenbook have encouraged everyone to do a green card meeting which is where everyone comes together to talk about their aims uh when it comes to sustain ability and I think that’s really important um and we’re definitely trying to do that across all of our shows now
Brilliant so thank you so much zo I honestly didn’t realize it took all this kind of material and then also energy especially when it came to like learning about the sound and the lights and the whats behind it into a production so yeah it’s very very urgent to kind of um
Be able to redesign these kind of elements as well um so that’s it for our practical howt what’s a lot of learning across two days feels like I’ve been in a boot camp for an entire week we certainly need education to change and so for our final session we’ve gathered
Educators from across the globe to have a conversation about exactly that click on to the next how-to session and see you there but if that’s not your bag then switch over to the main stage for our final big hitting conversation of the festival where you’ll see Sarah Wigglesworth and ehab Sayad talking with
Deb Nan about how buildings can conserve and create energy thank you so much