“A lot of immersive work creates whole worlds to enter into. Realistic or mythic, but total. I think most of the stuff that inspires me lies somewhere between the two – in the relationship between reality and myth. Absurd and dreamy together – that’s where the real magic lies!” Gemma Brockis – as her work as part of experimental site-specific legends Shunt collective, and with friend of the void Silvia Mercurali will testify – is an expert in the art of the in-between.
We welcome Gemma into the voidspace to explore how this sense of the liminal influences her relationship with space and audience, and gives the interaction in her work a unique (and often distinctly unsettling) flavour. Read on to find out the importance of clown and Shakespeare, the ways in which all theatre can be considered interactive, and how a play about a conference, the gunpowder plot and an executioner in a giant bear suit led to an armed raid by the bomb squad.
voidspace:
Gemma, welcome to the voidspace. We’re here to talk about your practice in general, past and present and future. And we’re here to talk about, the parts of it that relate to interactivity in different ways. Where would you like to start?
Gemma Brockis:
Hello, yes, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s always hard to know where to start.
voidspace:
When we had a little chat before we got started recording, you talked about how maybe all theatre was immersive or interactive. Perhaps that’s a good place to start.
Gemma Brockis:
Yes. I did. Why not start there.
All theatre is immersive!
I do actually approach all theatre in a very similar way to the immersive work I’ve done. Because I think of the theatre as the whole place, not just the stage.
There is a story I really like about – I think it was Alec Guiness – auditioning for O What a Lovely War at Stratford East in the 60s. He walked onto the stage and looked out to what seemed to be an empty auditorium. No director in the director’s seat in the centre stalls. Then he heard Joan Littlelwood (the director) call out from the cheap seat in the gods – ‘What are you giving us then?’ It’s about the connection between the performers and the audience, always. And filling the whole room. Whatever the style.
Even the fourth wall is just a way of playing with the audience. It means that you’re all going to pretend there is a wall where there isn’t. Imagine, in the 1860s, when naturalism was taking off, it must have been so exciting. You go into the theatre. The lights go down on you, and now you’re in the dark. Now there is a glowing box before you. Electric light. The actors are turning their backs on you as if you’re not even there. You sink into the darkness and feel invisible. If you think about the experience, it’s always there.
Antonin Artaud (a radical artist from the 20s) didn’t like fourth wall theatre because he said it made the audience into peeping toms. But peeping is active. He gives them a role, even. It’s not passive.
And theatre is an interaction, even if the audience isn’t getting on stage and being given a lollipop. Which is also fun by the way. Laughter is the most obvious way that energy is passed between performance and audience, but interaction is always there. One actor told me she’d been pleased with getting a laugh and a fellow actor asked, “What quality of laugh?”. It’s famously hard to put theatre into words, but actors do find a language for it – riding laughs, landing jokes, hearing a pin drop, or the audience on the edge of their seats. So much of this language of theatre is about the energy flowing between the audience and the performers. And even the physical state of the audience. On the edge of their seats.
voidspace:
I love that. So, what you’re saying – or what I’m hearing – is that there’s always an element of exchange in the room. As a theatre goer, I guess I’m focusing on what’s going on on stage, but there’s the idea that actually you’re getting something back all the time, and reacting to that.
Gemma Brockis:
Yes – absolutely. Because if the audience laughs, then that changes the rhythm of the show, and really the rhythm of the room. Like a musical improvisation.
voidspace:
Laughter changes things and it kind of becomes a conversation.
Gemma Brockis:
Yes, conversation is a good word. And listening is an active part of that. From the actors and the audience. It’s not that I am shitting on immersive work. After all, it’s what I’m known for. But I don’t like calling an audience, in an auditorium, passive. If we saw a thousand elephants sitting still looking at one elephant, we’d say, what are they doing? What are all those elephants doing?
I was in the wings with an actor last year and he whispered “Listen to that!”. It was the silence and stillness in the auditorium. So, I suppose what I’m drawn to say is that, from the way I approach making art, the audience is always alive, so they are always immersed, always interacting. And silence and stillness can be very active too.
It’s just how you play with that.
voidspace:
Tell me a bit more about the background to Shunt. What made you want to try out this kind of work?
Gemma Brockis:
So – I came to live in London when I was twenty-one, and I went to drama school for a year (the ATP course at Central) and I met nine friends, and we started a company. Within four months of graduating, we had taken the lease out on a railway arch. So I had a – venue – before I’d ever performed in a show in the city. Within a couple of years, our work was being called ‘immersive’. We left our home venues in 2010 and finally closed our books in 2014. And that experience is still fundamental to who I am artistically.
Ha. A short answer to a big life.
Structurally, Shunt was very unusual. The founders of Shunt all shared the rent on a railway arch – our first venue. This shared rent defined the collective. Artistically, we collaborated with other artists (the Ringham brothers did sound in all of the shows and we invited in male performers because we didn’t have any) but the company and the collective had separate functions.
It was our long-run shows, which were collaborations with the whole collective and associate artists, that were called immersive. The collective came up with the initial artistic vision – the story, or source, and the structural design. Then we invited people in to do specific jobs. Like, as I say, sound design, or to play specific roles. The scenographic designer was a part of the collective.
Just. I think I’ll move on!
voidspace:
What was your first venue – the railway arch – like?
Gemma Brockis:
We first worked in this one single brick archway. One room, which was our rehearsal room, office, workshop, bar, foyer, stage, auditorium, dressing room, everything. We had a separate toilet, but that was it. We answered the box office phone during rehearsals and pretended to take details down as quickly as we could, and then went back to rehearsing. The room was layered up, with so many different functions.
We really wanted the performance to exist in all of that room, without the filter of ticketing or ushers, or – well yes, we actively avoided having ushers. We didn’t want a buffer between the performance and the audience. I think in some ways we were the kind of performers who were as interested in the function of ushering as in the function of performing. We all liked being behind the bar, even in our latest years. Because this is the front line to the audience. Before they’ve got ‘ready’ for the fiction.
When Shunt finally did a show that really needed lots of ushering, we cast all the performers as ushers. and gave them uniforms and name badges. Amato Saltone starring Kittens and Wade was the show. Kittens and Wade were ushers.
And we used the Shunt name within the show fiction. So, the flight in our first show – The Ballad of Bobby Francois (2000) – was operated by Shunt Air. And the terrorist meeting in Dance Bear Dance (2003) was run by Shunt Conferencing. In a way, we were playing with Shunt as a mask for the fiction as much as the other way round.
There was often an organisation of some sort in our shows, with a relation to the space. And we often cast the performers as functionaries of the space. Waiters, clerks, security guards, even its architects. But the relationship between performers and space was never stable. The space has its own story, its own life, its own power. In Tropicana (2004), the advice to the visitors on how they needed to behave was a badly prepared spontaneous speech, and my introduction was interrupted by another performer with another group of visitors. We had an argument about a double-booking on the room. So we were often playing with not being in control. Any power we thought we had in the space often turned out to be absurd or hubristic, and I think this was a sort of recognition of our real relationship with running a venue. You might as well say you own a cat.
In Tropicana we explicitly made a functionary of the space into the hero. There was a lift (a fake lift that lots of people thought was real) which took the audience into the deep show. The lift operator chatted and took a photo and then sent them out into the darkness. But he kept popping up. A video of him in the welcome room. Then him in a horizontal lift travelling through the arches. Then the whole audience followed his hearse towards his wake. And the final scene was his autopsy with his real head bursting through his corpse. The underlying story was that the lift had crashed while the audience were in it. Everything after the lift journey could be traced back to something that existed in the pre-lift world. We were excited by the idea that this ‘pre-show’ as people tended to call that bit of performance, was something the audience might ignore. It’s a pleasure when the supporting, maybe invisible character, the usher, the waiter, is revealed to be the star.
So, the space was leading us all the time. That is what brought us together.
voidspace:
How do you go about creating this sort of work, which is led by the space as much as anything else?
Gemma Brockis:
I always spend time with the theatre itself. As much as possible. The empty theatre. Or room. Or building. Or park. The route in for the audience. If I’m working in any room or any space, I like to sit with it. Soaking it up. And choosing the most exciting perspectives within it.
In Shunt, we would approach the space almost like a director might approach a star actor. We’d work it before we cast it. We wanted to challenge it to do something unexpected, but we also wanted it to shine.
We’d begin with expectations from the exterior. Walking into it and feeling that experience. A surprise room in central London can feel huge, where a bigger room in Dagenham might feel small. Then we’d be in the space, exercising it from many different perspectives. And then present options for the show, followed shortly by design. If the space is, say, an old coal jetty on top of the Thames, then this approach is absolutely huge within the experience.
In the first show in our little railway arch, we went epic. We wanted to aim big. So we cast it as The Andes. We made a show about the rugby team who crashed in the Andes in 1972 and were stranded there, and ended up eating the dead, far away from civilization. It was a challenge. It began with everyone in a plane made from string and paper, which disintegrated in an extremely loud and completely blacked out plane crash. We simply cut the strings and it fell apart. The plane disappeared. And then we were in The Andes.
It seemed like a stretch, with no money and a little damp archway. But the space did offer this feeling of being hidden from civilisation. A discomfort and an unknown. We were an unknown company also. This was part of the experience for the audience. At one point, the door to the alley became pivotal. It was the only door in the room (except the toilet as I’ve mentioned before). Quite late in the show, one of us became aware of this door, with its exit sign, which up to that point had been ignored. One of those things the audience is supposed to mentally wipe out of the design. This door became the focus of all our hope. But when we opened it, what should have been the alley in Bethnal Green was instead a brick wall. This was strong, because that was the only exit. It was like the fiction had hit that bit of the room that was supposed to be exempt from the fiction. It got me every time. The hit. A small coup de theatre. When you slam the brakes and pivot between the imaginary world and the real space.
voidspace:
Can you tell me a bit more about Shunt’s process of working with different spaces?
Gemma Brockis:
Yes. Yes. Yes. So many things in my head.
Sometimes we’d go with the space, and sometimes we’d look for contrasts. So, in our next show in our railway arch (Dance Bear Dance), we set the show in this exact railway arch underneath the trains (in The Andes Show, the trains became a rumble of avalanche). Typecast. The fiction was that it was operating as a terrorist cell that had packed gunpowder to blow up a train overhead.
Another example of using contrast – when we made Tropicana. We knew the show was called Tropicana before anything, because David [Rosenburg] had this vision of a Tropicana dancer. That was all. Something so out of place against the dank brickwork. In this case, we wanted something completely at odds to the moody vibe of the underworldly vaults. But the women in vibrant feathers also emphasised the beauty of the architecture. Their flesh and colour against the brickwork. We tried it – I remember Louise [Mari] saying: “skin really works in here”. So we’d use the contrast and scale, between their strong, vital bodies and this heavy, heavy space with the weight of the station above. The dancers were like a plant pot close up in a landscape painting. Later on, we played with the story of Solaris because we started to get a bit desperate that all we had was dancers in various sorts of aerial strapping, and a lift. Tropicana was utterly a show made for that space. Impossible to imagine it anywhere else.
This idea of having one pinpoint to give life to the whole space excites me. I used this a lot when I made a show with my friend Silvia [Mercurali], in a car.
voidspace:
Ah yes, can you tell me a bit about Pinocchio. That was your 2007 show with Silvia, wasn’t it?
Gemma Brockis:
Yes – Pinocchio was a show in a car, with the audience in the back seats. It was like being in a road movie. We drove them about. I drove. We overlaid the Pinocchio myth onto the real environment. So, at one moment, Silvia was running fast along the sea wall against the sunset, with a sweeping score blasting out of the car radio, as I tracked her journey. She was the plant pot in this scenario. I guess I’m saying these shows are about harnessing the whole landscape, but also using ourselves to point towards the beauty in the landscape. We used the car radio to provide a sort of Italian new wave fantasy over the whole experience. We were influenced by Pasolini, Fellini. We wanted it to have that weirdness and beauty. Those landscapes.
You can really play between reality and fantasy in real environments. We ended this show with a long silent drive, and a weird hypnotic repeating musical track. Me in a blue wig, and Silvia in a paper nose, weeping. We wanted that feel of the long drive at midnight, because that’s a memory I cherish. Sitting in the back seat of the car, just looking out the windows and letting all the drama of the show infuse that moment.
voidspace:
And the audience is really within that world.
Gemma Brockis:
Yes. They were like hitchhikers. But we weren’t pretending that they were driving the action. I was literally driving the action. In one version, we would ask the audience to give us cash so we could buy things, buy petrol, move the show on. Like, if you give us the money, we’ll drive out of London to the sea. We didn’t go that way though. Just one of those early ideas.
voidspace:
It sounds crazy. I wish I’d been there. When Silvia was describing this experience, she was saying how you start off in a car park and a car just pulls up, and I think you get a text message or something to get you to the right place?
Gemma Brockis:
Yes. Then we drove in and pulled the car up at the furthest distance we could get. And I got out and walked to the audience, with the soundscape on a tape recorder. Longshot to close up. To shaking hands. We were inspired by this one shot in Playtime, where a woman walks down a long corridor.
voidspace:
When I was listening to Silvia talking about that, I was thinking, “Good God, you would not be able to get away with that in this day and age!” I was reading an article about how Niantic and Punchdrunk were going to do this thing, out on the streets. And one of the big arguments they had was about getting the audience to get into a car, and the elements of safety around that. And it got me thinking about how the conversation has moved a lot more in recent years, for good or ill, towards prioritising safeguarding, over creating a sense of danger.
Gemma Brockis:
It wasn’t so easy back then. Because there was just no language to talk about this with any authorities. We kept finding ourselves trying to describe to car insurance companies what kind of theatre might happen in a car. We eventually got a licence through brilliant Greg [Piggot] at BAC – saying we could perform as long as the driver wasn’t acting. We asked what that meant. I wasn’t allowed to speak. We said, ok, we can work with that. Anyway, the movement of the car did my talking.
The safeguarding in that case was simple legality and safety. Really. Drive safely. Don’t speed. This kind of thing. I was essentially a taxi driver in a wig with a sound system.
In Shunt shows, I think it’s all about finding the complicity with the audience. Same as in clown. You look into the eyes and you judge what you can do with someone. Our audience were utterly present, but we never really asked them to do anything more than be there. Be an audience. Aesthetically, it was almost like they were extras in a movie. Powerful because of their numbers. And present. But not driving the action.
But without them, the show would be meaningless. And look stupid. They fleshed out the picture.
voidspace:
It’s about creating a way of making it feel seamless. You’re not expecting to suddenly have to stand up and give a main character speech, but you are still on a level and you’re still part of it. And I think mentally and emotionally, you then become part of it in a different way as well.
Gemma Brockis:
This is also a reason Shunt have never made a show set in a period, though we have often made work based on historic events – like Dance Bear Dance, the terrorist show based on the gunpowder plot. But if the actors are in period clothes, sitting next to audience in modern clothes – well, that wasn’t what we were doing. That’s a specific relationship, when they become ghosts, or whatever. So yes. The audience was always vital to the action, to the aesthetic. Addressed by the show and a full part of the journey of it, without playing a part in a LARP-y way.
voidspace:
You’re creating a shared understanding with the audience: that tension where they know that they’re really not going to be asked to do XYZ… but there’s the possibility that they might.
Gemma Brockis:
Yes – and I suppose, I keep coming back to the real experience. In The Tennis Show (2000), we split the audience into men and women for the first half of the show. The women performed for the women and vica versa. That was a really curious effect. I guess that was taking a kind of everyday split – to go into the changing rooms – and applying it in a theatre context, which suddenly made it feel quite odd.
Or – an example of playing with a simple theatre thing. Box office. The audience is paying for an experience. That’s important. In Dance Bear Dance, Serena [Bobowski] was the member of the organisation who took cash from the audience for entry. Cash only. No presales (as I said before, we’d answer the phone and pretend to take details). So then, Serena put their money in a briefcase and gave them their badge / ticket. Then, when the conference began, she handcuffed this briefcase to her wrist. Later, during the conference, she opened the case to pass me wads of £50 notes for various terrorist needs, duct tape, horses, sex. The point is that the real box office experience of paying the Shunt theatre collective was fictionalised as funding a terrorist cell. Where is the money going? What are we paying for? Entertainment? Is it fun? Who knows.
This juxtaposition of Shunt as a theatre company and Shunt as a terrorist cell reached a kind of extraordinary zenith two years later. I just have to tell this story because it’s wild. We had moved to a new space under London Bridge station and an electrician was working overnight, so David and I were staying there. This electrician found the prop ‘documentation’ from this previous show. It had pages describing how we would disguise ourselves as croupiers and choirboys and cartoonish images of blowing up the train overhead. The electrician reported us to the Met terrorist branch and we were raided by police with machine guns and head torches. I had popped out to get food and came back to the road closed off with 8 police vans and warnings of an incident. It all ended with us taking the chief superintendent on a tour of the space and explaining why our theatre company didn’t have theatre seats. The fictional and completely absurd terrorist pamphlet, a prop in Dance Bear Dance, is now in a plastic evidence bag somewhere in a police records office. They were prepping to evacuate the station, London Bridge itself, and Guys Hospital.
voidspace:
I know you wanted to have theatrical impact in the real world, but…
Gemma Brockis:
Yes, it was so strange. One policeman with an automatic rifle told me it was the first time he believed he was actually entering a terrorist cell. The clowny conference, which was a kind of satire, was suddenly taken frighteningly seriously by the real world.
voidspace:
That’s amazing.
When you talk about clown and you’re talking about how all these things relate to clown… Can you expand on that?
Gemma Brockis:
Oh, I’d love to yes, because clown is it.
Clown straddles reality and fantasy in the way I’ve been talking about. With a classic clown, their eyes are looking straight into yours. Deeply into yours. But their nose is in another world. The red nose is not at all realistic. It’s just a blob. The eyes are real, locked onto you – but the nose is a myth. The audience makes a face with those two things together.
voidspace:
I love that.
Gemma Brockis:
I love it too. I love clown.
The first exercise I did in clown class, just when I first came to London, with De Castro, was standing in front of the audience and looking in the eyes of the other participants, one by one by one. And we were told to do nothing. But of course you’re never doing nothing, any more than an audience is ever doing nothing. The challenge was to look, to really look at the audience with curiosity. Look into their eyes for a while. You don’t act looking. You really look. So you are really there. I immediately felt at home with this way of theatre. Though sometimes clown training gets really brutal.
This is the sort of work that Shunt started from. The very earliest Shunt shows were definitely clown shows.
Clown is all playing with the audience. So – well, it’s already immersive/interactive in its way. And the interaction can be very subtle. I think about somebody like my friend Jaimie Wood, who is a brilliant clown. He is able to bring people into delicate places, being in a paper bag with them, or wrestling them on the floor. But it’s about very fine judgement of who to do what with, pushing, but always being ready to pull back. The audience needs to feel that the show won’t break if they get it wrong. Or say no. The clown has to know how to make a ‘no’ as entertaining as a ‘yes.’ That’s the point.
Without being a dick about it, the audience shouldn’t have to feel like they have to pretend to be interested in you or excited by you. And sometimes, that’s how I feel in immersive theatre. As in, I have to pretend to be entranced by this so the performer feels good. I’m not actually thinking about myself. I’m concerned for the performer. Sometimes. So we are both in a fiction, but not in a good way. We are in the fiction that I’m into this.
I really strive to avoid this feeling. Not easy.
And audience misunderstandings have to be embraced as opportunities. In a one-on-one show I made for BAC, an audience misread a written note and took all his clothes off. The note actually read, “please take your shoes off”. So there I was, dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are, sitting cross-legged opposite this man, trying to work out how to get him to put his clothes on in the next 7 minutes. It has to be my responsibility to hold the room and make his choice work. I have to hold him. And ideally make his misunderstanding into a great choice. The last thing I want is for him to feel, later on, that he fucked up in some way.
voidspace:
Clown training, maybe that’s the missing link. I know that some other companies go for people with dance training, because you’ve got contact improv and you’ve got that sense of reading people from that.
Gemma Brockis:
Yes, all performance is about reading people, I suppose. I found clown language is the one that inspires me the most. Because it embraces this inherent duality of performing.
And clown training often includes quite intense physical training, of course. Lots of improvised acrobatics and lifts, and throws, and falls. Shunt used to do quite a bit of this sort of training. But it’s not the high physical that I’m really talking about. It’s the way of engaging with the world, the space, the audience.
In Shunt, I think we applied some of this logic to the whole space. So the audience come into this space which is already other. This space makes them behave in an obvious way. And then the clown responds to what they see. The environment presents the audience to the clown and the clown makes their assumptions.
So, I often play the audience role as a case of mistaken identity. A mistake on my part. For example, in Dance Bear Dance, they sit at the conference table. The only table in the room. They give us money. They seem to know where they are going. What am I to do but assume they are fellow terrorists? It’s my mistake. They politely play along. But they’re not playing a role. I’m assuming they are in this role. It’s really rare I tell them what to do, because I assume they know what to do.
And the upshot of this, is that I find it odd when they behave like an audience. Say, if they laugh at something I believe to be serious. Strange.
In this show, this fissure was fundamentally part of the story. So the audience started as ‘friends’. I called them ‘friends’. Then they laughed at me. A slight suspicion. And gradually the rift grew. Skip to the end of the show, and the audience is drinking in the bar while the performers are being executed by a large bear over the course of 40 minutes. The curtain call. The execution was the release from the fiction. So the journey of the audience becoming a theatre audience was the deep story.
voidspace:
Was that something that you’d written into it from the beginning, when you were thinking of the concept? Or did it come up a bit more organically?
Gemma Brockis:
Oh, it was much more organic. I mean, we never really knew what we were doing in a decided way. We tried a lot, and talked a lot. We had the story of the gunpowder plot, so we knew we needed the executions, but we hadn’t found anything we liked. That final scene was made after we opened. I just turned up one day and they said, “We’ve got an end – let’s put it in tonight”. I fell in love with it immediately. The bear was played by the dramaturg, the director or the designer over the course of nine months. This is what I mean about sharing the vision. We were all so there for it.
I keep wanting to say that my interpretation – this interpretation of the process – would be expressed completely differently by someone else in the company. We have never really discussed a ‘process’. The process was very messy. The one thing that I think we can agree on is that we worked by showing stuff. Presentation.
We’d present material to the group all the time. Send them out of the room, set up, bring them in – sharing little shows. I still work like this. So there is lots of being an audience within the process – for the cast, I mean. Presenting on big ideas, presenting stuff for other people’s scenes, not only for your own role. Trying to find the thing that sets the room alight. And then the audience comes, and it’s not ready,and you just have to do something. And then you continue to make it better.
It’s always about coming back to the real experience of the audience in the space.
When we were making Wiretapper (2016), a headphones show in Trafalgar Square, we were a bit lost one day, talking round in circles. So we sat down on the steps and looked at the square for a while. Coming back to that first question: What would be the most exciting thing here? What would bring this place to life? One simple decision, maybe.
And then we are looking at the sky – and – I don’t know who says. Nigel [Barrett] I think says – “Oh, it’d be so great if we suddenly tuned in to hear inside that aeroplane”.
Then we watched for 20 minutes and realised that actually, quite a lot of the time there is an aeroplane overhead. That could work. And so then you take the risk, because then you say, well, we make it so that you say, “look up the aeroplane”. Zone in to hear what’s going on inside it. Zone out.
And maybe there isn’t an aeroplane in the sky, but maybe as an audience member, you think that you just have missed the aeroplane, so it’s okay. It’s never really BAD. And mostly it’s good. And then sometimes – there was one time, we heard the plane in the headphones and just then, this plane flew low over the top of the National Gallery. And that was incredible. Like the whole city was at our beck and call.
So you kind of take a risk.
voidspace:
You’re building the entire scene so that you’re in a febrile enough atmosphere that those coincidences are going to happen and people are going to feel like it’s drawing something out of themselves. Although actually you very cleverly constructed it so that it’s going to hit that way. It’s a method of scene building that is thinking a bit more broad than just what your set’s going to be.
Gemma Brockis:
I think that’s why I come back to the idea of theatre. A lot of immersive work creates whole worlds to enter into. Realistic or mythic, but total. I think most of the stuff that inspires me lies somewhere between the two – in the relationship between reality and myth. Absurd and dreamy together – that’s where the real magic lies!
In Pinocchio, when I was driving, I showed them my real driving licence at the top of the show. But I was actually the Blue Fairy. In the story. So ‘Gemma Brockis’ was my real world disguise. If I had to speak to people in the ‘real world’, I spoke to them as Gemma Brockis. I spoke to the police, on one occasion. So obviously, I had to be myself. I got back in the car, drove away to a safe distance, and started to laugh: “They fell for it!”
voidspace:
So, you like to paddle around in that liminal space.
Gemma Brockis:
Yeah. Paddle or splash.
I like to be in that place. Not in a meta way, more in a theatrical way, so you absolutely know that’s…
voidspace:
Just for the purposes of the tape, Gemma is doing a kind of a smooth space, little swipe with her finger, like a little bowl between two mountains or something. Just moving between one and the other in a very smooth and fluid way. That’s lovely.
So, what are you up to at the moment?
Gemma Brockis:
Yeah, OK.
Hamlet is with me right now. I want to do a production of Hamlet. It is so thrilling.
And I am writing a book about the history of theatre. A glossary of all the things that inspire and intrigue me. Including Hamlet’s skull and the Paris Morgue and iron curtains. And I have been giving lectures on the History of the Kiss of Peace in cabarets. This has been interesting. This is all part of my university project, the University of O.
And Hamlet. Hamlet talks about kissing a skull. Or that a skull can’t kiss. I keep finding myself back at Shakespeare because it all goes back that way, a kind of sepulchrum of everything that I love. The relationship with the audience and the theatre space in that play is so infinite. Especially if you think of it as an immersive, interactive experience. Which going to Elizabethan theatre was. Because it might send you to hell.
Shakespeare never stops giving.
I find the thought of those theatres so alluring. When the thought of pretending was so risky. And I think that’s still at risk. Now, actually, but that’s a different conversation. But in those shows – I mean, theatres were outlawed for religious reasons within 50 years of Shakespeare. So that sense of what is at stake in the room is powerful. Fun. Intriguing. I find that very inspiring.
voidspace:
One final question: what advice would you give to aspiring creators in your field?
Gemma Brockis:
I think it’s quite simple, really.
Think of what you want. As an audience. What you really want. What you would really love. What you need, even. What would surprise and delight you. What would maybe hit you, even.
And try to make that.
Gemma is currently performing in Deadweight Theatre’s The Manikins: A Work in Progress, at Kingswood Arts, until 3 November 2024
Find out more about Gemma’s work