Mike Shepherd, Founder and former Artistic Director of Kneehigh, contemplates the theatrical and educational landscape, and introduces the Kneehigh Legacy Project.
Production photograph from The Tin Drum (2017) Credit: Steve Tanner
In my grander, more private moments, I would call myself an educationalist. I started out as a teacher. Yes, I wanted to do theatre and I wanted to be wild and free, but the advice I got from my father was to get a teacher’s certificate so that I’d always got something to fall back on. That was a brilliant bit of advice. I started in London, in Archway, and I very quickly realised the thing that I was interested in, i.e. drama, was not really taken seriously. I was shown the drama studio. It was an old, World War Two Nissen hut that was really skanky, on the edge of the campus of the school, it felt like being in the ghetto! I quickly realised that I needed to make the space somewhere you’d like to be.
The first thing I did was to clean it, redecorate it and then fill it with inspirations; stuff pinned to the walls, a random collection of costumes on a rail, some lighting states, music, always music…stuff… stuff to be creative with. I even installed a Baby Belling cooker and encouraged the cooking of tasty snacks.
Kneehigh’s The Asylum (2010 – 2019) Credit: Steve Tanner
Hilariously, this used to happen when Kneehigh first did co-productions. I remember arriving at various rehearsal rooms with Emma Rice, at West Yorkshire Playhouse for example, or even at the National. There’s always a sense of evacuation, the markups from the previous rehearsal, hurriedly left detritus and the ubiquitous bits of Blu Tac on the walls – not the conditions to be creative! The first thing we did with the team was prepare the space. In Leeds we cleaned, and decorated. We’d literally buy paint and repaint the walls, and then people would be sent out into Leeds market: Yeah, let’s have a bowl of fruit! Let’s have some colour! Let’s have some flowers! Let’s go to the Leeds West Yorkshire wardrobe and get a rail of costumes that we might play with! Suddenly you’ve created a space for creativity, and that’s what I learned in that Nissen hut as a really young teacher: that you had to create the conditions for creativity. And this isn’t my idea, it’s Ken Robinson’s, who I discovered years and years after that. That was so reassuring, because everything he was saying was what I already believed in.
There has been no human achievement without imagination.
We need to educate people into being resourceful and creative at whatever age. That Nissen hut became very important to me as a teacher. How do you actually fire up the imagination, encourage the imagination, get an energy in the room? We’ve recently done an Arts Week here at the Kneehigh Barns with primary school children. The chair of the board of the local school rang me up and said, “I want every child in the school to walk from the school”, because you can walk over the cliff to the barns “and I want them all to be at the barns for a week”. That’s infants through to year 6, and they all did it. There were a couple of days where they arrived in their raincoats and they were soaking wet, and all the rest of it, and it was brilliant. It exploded all sorts of things and everyone learnt an enormous amount despite the fact that the brief was, “I don’t care what you do, as long as it’s the opposite of the National Curriculum”.
If you can create the conditions for creativity, the collective imagination is going to give you far more than I could come up with on my own as a director. I quite often task people during the process when I think, ‘right, secretly, I don’t know what to do next, so I’m going to task people to look around the different spaces and the outer environs, find whatever and build a little shrine to your character, for example. Fairly quickly people respond to the idea. Both Emma and myself are very reluctant to tell people what to do. If there’s one thing I’d like people to do within the arts is be instinctive.
Production photograph from The Tin Drum (2017) Credit: Steve Tanner
People direct (and teach) in different ways, but I couldn’t do the kind of rehearsal room that I see now where there’s a creative team with an actual physical barrier of desks, and it’s a double barrier, because they’ve all got their laptop screens up as well. I have to be there looking at what people do and where that might go: what the opportunities are and encouraging people to give ideas. You don’t judge those ideas. You take them for a run, a hop, a skip, and a jump, and you’re brave enough to do that. Not all the time when you’re making theatre, because there are times, just like in the classroom, where you need to teach and pass things on, and you don’t want everyone chipping in all the time. But you want people to be involved and to care.
I keep coming back to that: care.
Kneehigh closed in 2021 and now myself and a group of Kneehigh alumni and supporters are working on the Kneehigh Legacy Project. We’re exploring ways to care for and continue Kneehigh’s impact, influence and inspiration. We’re taking care to find out from teachers, students and other interested parties how we can best support and inform their theatre making now, and into the future. We have an experienced teacher working with us to create teaching resources and materials, we are keeping the Kneehigh Barns open as a home for creativity, and we are working with Falmouth University who have held our archive since 2010.
Kneehigh’s The Asylum (2010 – 2019) Credit: Steve Tanner
Over the coming months, you’ll be hearing more from us about what’s next for the Kneehigh Legacy. It’s an exciting time where we consider rehearsal rooms and productions of the past and prepare to introduce new students to the Kneehigh spirit and possible ways of working: they are the new artists moving into rehearsal rooms and leaving their own mark on them.
Meanwhile, we hope that your own teaching spaces are offering up opportunities for you and your students to imagine, play and care.
Calvino Nights presented by Mike Shepherd in Cahoots with the Minack Theatre. Credit: Steve Tanner
Calvino Nights presented by Mike Shepherd in Cahoots with the Minack Theatre. Credit: Steve Tanner
Production photograph from The Tin Drum (2017) Credit: Steve Tanner