There is shame throughout theatre in so many ways. There is shame in immersive theatre, there is shame in interactive theatre, there is shame in interactive gaming. There is shame, shame, shame all over the place. It is the strongest rule set we have.
Jenifer Toksvig has taken a long, hard look at the rules – unspoken conventions surrounding live performance that many of us take for granted – and has concluded that many of them shame people who want, or need, to participate in a different way. Her radical approach to access – The Copenhagen Interpretation – rebuilds interactive performance from the ground up, with one question at it’s heart: how can we eradicate shame from this space?
We welcome Jenifer into the Voidspace to discuss her method, how creators can use it to interrogate their own practice, and how taking a mindful approach to access can make experiences better for everyone.
Voidspace:
Welcome to the Voidspace! I am really thrilled to be able to talk to you today about your work. And just to get started, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about who you are, and the work that you do here.
Jenifer Toksvig:
My name is Jenifer Toksvig. I make theatre. I used to be a musical theatre writer. I still am, I suppose, but it became so challenging for me. I realised about 10 years ago that it takes 10 years to get a musical on, and that that wasn’t going to be a career. I thought about why, because I wanted to still work in theatre. I used to be a performer a long, long time ago, but that isn’t a thing I can accommodate any more. And I realised two things.
The first was I got a diagnosis of neurodivergence a couple of years ago: I was diagnosed with ADHD and then subsequently with autism. And I realised that the industry doesn’t provide for me very well. And then I realised that the industry doesn’t provide for anyone very well. And then I realised that I would need to make theatre in my own way in order to be able to access it fully. So I started developing a process that I call The Copenhagen Interpretation, which I’m happy to talk about.
Voidspace:
What is the Copenhagen Interpretation?
Jenifer Toksvig:
So The Copenhagen Interpretation is a theory in quantum mechanics, quantum physics, that purports that if a quantum particle exists in all possible forms simultaneously, it just presents itself as one of those forms when it’s observed. And the rest of the time, it’s everything it can be, all at once.
And I maintain that live theatre should be that experience, that every time you experience a piece of live theatre, it should be different. And many people in traditional theatre will say it is different every time. And it is. You go in the rain, you feel differently from if you go and it’s a nice sunny day. You go with a friend, you feel differently from if you’re going on your own because it’s work, and you’re reviewing it. Everybody always feels differently in every performance, but theatre is not designed to accommodate or to be responsive to that in any way.
And it’s one of our major issues. One of our major issues with that is access and inclusivity, because theatre is designed to be the same every time. And this is where I get into arguments with people who have spent years as a performer: they say every performance is different every time, but it really doesn’t accommodate the difference.
Voidspace:
Yeah, that’s exactly the conversation that I find myself having when I try to explain what interactive theatre is. What’s different for me about interactive theatre is that that conversation becomes genuinely two-way, and there is a dialogue where the audience participant should, in some dramaturgically meaningful way, get to speak back, and for that to be incorporated into, or be essential to, the overall piece.
Jenifer Toksvig:
So I disagree with most interactive theatre, that it isn’t really interactive. And this is all probably just best noted as theoretical, but in theory, theatre isn’t interactive in much of what calls itself immersive theatre. So there’s a lot of theatre that is fourth-wall, but it’s portable fourth-wall.
Voidspace:
Completely. I agree. Which is why I always emphasise the “interactive” in “immersive-interactive”, because immersive doesn’t necessarily mean interactive.
Jenifer Toksvig:
No, but also interactive doesn’t necessarily mean interactive.
Voidspace:
This is true. It all depends on the specific work and the aims of the creators, and if they actually succeed in meeting those aims.
Jenifer Toksvig:
So I looked at gaming. I’m a gamer. For years, I’ve played freeform roleplay, not so much table top, but online freeform. I looked at that world, and looked at where anybody has agency, proper and true agency.
Voidspace:
Genuine agency, yeah.
Jenifer Toksvig:
And I looked at where story structure supports us in agency, and where it inhibits us in agency. There’s a lot of interactive… like, LARP (live-action roleplay) is probably the freest in terms of a structure that is set up. It’s solid enough to build a world for the people who are participating, but it’s free enough that participants have agency over their own character, their own character story, depending on what LARP you’re playing. And many of them are more strictly guided than that. But there are ones where you are free to know the world and invent your own character, and that person can have their own story, and that’s fine.
Even then, it’s very difficult for me to engage with those things because in a LARP, you know, I wouldn’t just walk into the woods in my jeans and a T-shirt if I’m coming into a very heavily costumed LARP. It’s very difficult to be present in those things. People do build ways in that you can be present and not be participating, but I think I still want to be participating.
Voidspace:
It takes a lot of work. Onboarding is one of the most important areas to focus on when you’re trying to make this work. Finding a way of making sure that the audience is genuinely incorporated into the world so that there’s no blocker, there’s no work for them to do.
Sometimes with LARP, I feel like you have to be the right kind of person. You have to have a willingness to really engage in a very particular and quite heavy-duty way. I’ve always said that I like interactive theatre because I’m too lazy for LARP. More of the work is done – when it’s done well, to bring me in – without me having to really create my own character. But I think that’s a matter of personal taste, probably.
Jenifer Toksvig:
I understand that. My personal taste is to not be in the world, but to be present in the room.
Voidspace:
Interesting. How does that work?
Jenifer Toksvig:
Agency is what we need for access. The only person who can properly respond to any need for access support really quickly is the person themselves. You are always going to be your own best First Responder in any given situation. If I move into a moment where I’m having a panic attack, and I use these phrases, these are proper medical terms, and I’m not trying to be restrictive with them. If I’m in a place where I feel uncomfortable and I’m panicking about that, I am the person who is best placed to respond to that immediately.
So I need to be able to access whatever support helps me no longer be in that situation. I’m also within that situation, so I need to be able to communicate to other people that I’m within that situation, whilst I’m within that situation. There are many, many barriers in traditional theatre auditoriums, obviously, that make that even harder for me, emotionally harder, psychologically harder, and just medically harder for me to handle a situation.
Voidspace:
That makes sense.
Jenifer Toksvig:
But it doesn’t have to be that I’m neurodivergent or that I have panic attacks or anxiety. It might be that I’m just menopausal and I am having a horrible hot flash, unexpectedly, that makes me feel faint. And then I need to deal with that. I need to address that. It could be anything. It might be that I need to take a phone call or make a phone call. It might be, to some people, that I need to check a football score.
And I have real issues with the way theatre talks about this stuff because we name a thing, and then we make a judgement about what that thing, that action means to that person. Then we make those assumptions and then we are immediately judgmental around our assumptions of what that issue is.
Voidspace:
There’s often a judgement made about what counts as a valid need. It’s interesting that you mentioned checking the football scores, and I’m sure you probably did that advisedly, but it just makes me think that it’s bundled up potentially with a lot of cultural prejudices and a lot of class prejudices too. People always say, oh, we want wider participation. We want theatre to be for everyone – as long as everyone is prepared to play by our rules.
Jenifer Toksvig:
My Dad loved the cricket, and when my parents would come to Sports Day, and the parents were expected to be watching people run races or whatever we were doing, my Dad would go back to the car and check the cricket scores. My Mum would get really pissed off with him. She’d be like, “Where are you going? Your daughter is running!” I’m a terrible runner. I have no problem with Dad wanting to go and check the cricket scores instead of watching me make an absolute fool of myself.
Voidspace:
Oh, wow. I hear that so bad!
Jenifer Toksvig:
That is a personal preference, right? And in theatre, we would say, well, if he did that, he would be disturbing other people’s experience. Yes, he would, because theatre is set up that way. We cannot avoid that that’s a thing. So if someone comes to the theatre with their partner and that makes their partner really happy, and they aren’t particularly a theatre person, but they enjoy moments of it, and they come and that’s fine, but they want to check the score, I want them to be able to do that. But I also don’t want everybody else to be so heavily disrupted by that, that they have to persecute that person.
Voidspace:
But then you have to make an environment so that that doesn’t happen. I was just thinking that it hasn’t always been that way. If you went to the Globe whenever it was, the expectations were completely different. Obviously, there wouldn’t be football.
Jenifer Toksvig:
Yes, they would shout out, they would go out and get some snacks, or they go and get laid, and then they’d come back.
Voidspace:
Yeah, exactly. You could heckle, you could do anything.
Jenifer Toksvig:
So here’s the thing about the fourth wall. We regard it, we say ‘the fourth wall’ and we think about the division between the auditorium where the audience sits, and the stage where the actors are performing. And it doesn’t have to be a traditional building. Anywhere where there is a division, and the cast are pretending they’re not aware, the characters are not aware there’s anybody there, or even if they are, that we’re invisible friends or whatever we are.
And it’s not that at all. That isn’t what the fourth wall is. The fourth wall is a glass box that you wear individually around you. So if someone next to me coughs, they break the glass box on that side of me. If an airplane goes overhead, it breaks the glass box above me.
This fragility is used for good and for bad reasons. There are good reasons. I have friends for whom their access needs are that they want to sit in the dark, in the quiet, and know that nobody is going to engage with them. They want the security of knowing that no one’s going to come near them, or talk to them, or ask them to do a thing, and they can just lose themselves in a story, and that’s their access need, and that’s just as important as anybody else’s. So the fourth wall box is important for them in that way.
But for me, for example, it’s really an issue because of things I want to do, like fidget, like I want to take knitting to the theatre. Often I will, and I will say to the people next to me, “I’m going to knit. Is that okay?” And sometimes they’ll say, “Yeah, that’s lovely. What are you knitting?” And sometimes they’ll just shrug and I’ll think, well, it’s clearly not okay with you, but I don’t know what else to do with myself. I realised a long time ago that I can’t really go to the theatre, and it’s insane because I make theatre.
Voidspace:
That’s really tough. When you find yourself being excluded from something that you ultimately love and is your thing. And that shows there’s something wrong there, and that’s not you.
Jenifer Toksvig:
I started thinking about what it would look like if we had full access. So there’s a thing called Open Space Technology, which was ‘realised’, I like to say, by a guy called Harrison Owen, a wonderful man who passed away recently, but left us a great gift.
And Open Space Technology is a system that’s used in conferencing a lot of the time, but it’s a way for a large group of people to get together and self-organise a big, broad conversation between a diverse group of people.
Essentially it has some principles – and I’m going to look these up now because I have slightly reworked the principles of Open Space, and I know that Harrison would be fine with that. It has some principles, and it has one rule. And the principles are just a beautiful thing that are an observation of what happens in real life anyway, regardless.
So the first principle – and these are my slightly rewritten versions, but I encourage anybody to go and look up Open Space Technology and you’ll find Harrison’s. But we slightly reworked them for this because they weren’t designed for theatre, and also, I think they weren’t designed to be especially about access or inclusivity, although they fully allow for it in more ways than I’ve ever found.
“Whatever brings you there and whatever you bring are the right things” is the first principle. So I don’t care if you’ve come to see the theatre because you love the theatre, or you love this actor, or you want to see this play, or you’re just accompanying somebody because it was their birthday and they love theatre, and you bought the tickets and you’re going with them.
I don’t care why you’re there. You can come and engage in my theatre because you just happen to live next door and you’ve popped in because you’re curious about what all the noise is. You can come along just because you don’t really care about the story, but you want to bring some cake you made. You can always bring cake. You can come just because you’re interested in one aspect of the play. You don’t have to care about the whole thing. And whatever you bring with you is the right thing. So whatever interest you bring, that you want to contribute, great. That’s really welcome.
Our second principle is: “What happened is what happened, and what’s happening is what’s happening”. So we never say, “You can’t bring that thing, or that thing can’t happen. We were supposed to talk about this, or we were supposed to do this story, so therefore we have to.” We say, “We were going to tell this story, but welcome, bring whatever you want, and if something else happens, that’s great”. We never say, “Oh no, we have to go from the beginning to the middle to the end, and we haven’t done the ending, so it’s broken”. We never say that.
I have this theory about story. I mean, it’s not a theory at all. It’s true, and all authors will agree with me. Stories are endless. Every story goes on forever. It never has a beginning, it never has an end. We choose – when we craft, those of us who write stories – we choose a beginning and a middle and an end. And then somehow theatre has said that it doesn’t count if you don’t have the beginning, the middle, and the end.
My parents used to come and watch me – when I was a kid, I was in a thing in town, and they would come and watch me, but they would watch the second half only. The first half, they’d go and have oysters. There was an oyster bar right there: they’d go and have oysters. And then they’d come and watch me in the second half. So they saw the end of the story a lot and didn’t see the beginning very much. And that’s fine, still.
I tell this story… this how I see story: when I’m walking through my house to get to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, if my wife is watching something on the TV and there’s two people arguing, say, I will stop and linger and see how the argument plays out. I don’t need to know who they are, and I don’t need to know the whole story. But it’s interesting to me to see that. I’ll get caught watching the argument. And then that will be over, and she’ll say, “Are you making tea?” And I’ll go, “Oh yeah”. And then I’ll go and make tea. But I had a nice experience of a bit of a story.
And I maintain that, by saying you have to have the beginning, the middle, and the end, by saying you can’t be late, by saying you can’t look away even for a moment, we’re doing a disservice to story and its ability to be responsive to us.
So the other principles are, “Wherever you get involved is the right place”. I maintain that you can just chat to somebody in the bar about the story, or you can hear about it, and have a conversation about it, from somebody who went to it, and you’re still engaging with it. I maintain that you don’t have to be sat in an auditorium where they’ve priced what they consider to be the ‘best’ seats as more expensive than the ‘worst’ seats. I think all of that is dreadful. It implies that there’s one perfect place to see this perfect thing and there’s one perfect performance. Make a movie, I love movies, make a movie if you want it to be perfect.
Voidspace:
If you want complete control over what someone else’s experience is going to be, be behind the camera.
Jenifer Toksvig:
Movies are wonderful.
The next principle we use is, “Whenever it starts for you is the right time”. So this whole latecomer thing is awful. There are people who… I mean, it’s very difficult to get to the theatre on time. You know, for so many reasons, not just the obvious ones. You have to organise your life, and lots of people have really complicated lives. And it’s costly, and it’s difficult to organise. And for those of us who are neurodivergent and forget that they are supposed to be talking to you first thing in the morning…! It’s not easy.
Voidspace:
I always found such a huge struggle… so I always loved theatre as a kid. My mum and I used to go to the RSC when it was still at the Barbican because it was just a few stops away on the Metropolitan Line for us. It was really easy.
But when I left home and started having to organise my theatre for myself, I found that I was hardly going because the challenge of trying to think months in advance, and remembering to check the season programme before everything sells out, and then book a thing, having to pick the phone up and make a booking, and then months and months later, you’ve got this ticket, but maybe it’s cold outside and maybe you’ve got to get into London. It’s only got more complicated as I’ve got older. I’ve got chronic fatigue issues as well now. I just can’t commit months in advance to booking something.
Jenifer Toksvig:
That’s not just true for people who have disabilities. That is true for people who have children…
Voidspace:
Absolutely. It’s true for lots of people.
Jenifer Toksvig:
So, yeah, “It’s over when it’s over for you” is the other principle. It could be that you spend five minutes with it, like me walking through to make a tea, and that’s great. And then it’s over and I can get on with my work. It might be that I’m still talking about the show three years later, and then I’m still engaged with the show, but the show is gone and over, and no one in the show cares that I’m still thinking about the show three years later. Or rather, they do care because they will use that as evidence that theatre matters, but they won’t engage with it. They can’t respond to it.
I’m talking about, for example, The Broad Cloth, which is a show that is made with The Copenhagen Interpretation. So The Broad Cloth is a fictional island, and it’s set on multiple different real islands. We’re working with a producer who has a home off the coast of Norway, above the Arctic Circle, on a tiny island where 14 people live. And one dog.
And the purpose of The Broad Cloth is to – I mean, there are many purposes to it – but we hope that it’s a tour without touring, without the killing-the-planet parts of touring, and many other reasons.
I don’t need validation from anybody for my participation in it, and I don’t feel the need to validate anybody else’s participation in it. But what I do want is for there to be a place where there are echoes of it that can respond. We have a Discord channel, and The Broad Cloth lives there, and it will live there forever. If anybody wants to come in and say, I just wanted to connect with some people again, to say that I’ve had repercussions of my experience, or I’ve had another thought, or I’ve had a new thought that I just wanted to share, it’s not gone. It’s still there, and you can still engage with it if you want, and it will still respond to you in whatever way.
Also, I think there will be an archive of the show on Ingøy, which is what it’s called, this little island. The plan is that it will be there, that it will exist there, that it will exist there like a transparency, like there’s a fiction that always exists on this island, forever. And I don’t care if anybody ever sees it. I don’t care if anybody… it might be that we bury it in a box and no-one ever sees it, and that’s okay. Just the acknowledgement that it existed, and that it continues to exist somewhere.
And theatre is very difficult because it’s very intense. This is the other thing: you go into rehearsals, it’s very intense. You’re fully engaged in this show, and making this show, and everybody’s talking about all of the little details, and it’s such a personal process, and you present it to an audience, and then you go on to the next thing and you get engrossed in the next thing.
And all those things, those bits of stuff will stay with you – which is lovely because that’s what happens for all of us, people who are in the shows and people who are not – but the connections are lost. And, especially as a neurodivergent person, the connection… connection, for me, generally, is a really important thing.
So I don’t expect that people have an obligation to maintain connections. That’s not what I’m saying. But I am saying there should always be a living, breathing space, because a play and a piece of theatre is a living, breathing thing for all of us in the room, not just me, but for the audience, most importantly.
So the fact that I just might come in with cake and get stuck watching two characters who are having an argument, two characters who are in a little moment, which might be a thing that I want to reconnect with again, or… I don’t know, it just stays alive. So yeah, all of those. I don’t want there to be any rules around that stuff. I want there to be the opportunity for that stuff to stay alive if it wants to.
Voidspace:
Yes – it honours that moment, whatever that moment was, and keeps it.
Jenifer Toksvig:
And then Open Space has one law, and we call it the Law of Freedom: you are free to choose to be where you choose to be, and do what you choose to do. You don’t need anybody’s permission to move between groups, and scenes, and moments, and actions, and interactions. You can pursue whatever brings you joy in that thing.
And this is not… So I’ve never been to a Punchdrunk experience. I only have a hearsay understanding of it, just to preface this. But a lot of my friends who have been and have spoken to me, have talked about ‘Fear Of Missing Out’, and they’ve talked about surprise, and shock, and things that I could never accommodate. And I’m not talking about ‘You go wherever you want to go, and then you might miss out on the good stuff, oh well’.
Voidspace:
If you’re genuinely offering people freedom, it has to include the freedom to catch particular bits of the story, or follow a particular character, not just to experience it in the one way that you see… as you said, the idea of the platonic ideal of how to experience theatre, are you actually bringing over a lot of baggage from the form that you claim to be breaking away from?
Jenifer Toksvig:
Yeah. And this is another reason why. So I have people in my practise, we call them Navigators, and they help us navigate an aspect of what this is because it’s complex to make such an open-spaced thing, and also say that we have a story, is a complex animal that I will never fully achieve.
Voidspace:
So how do you go about trying… I’d love to hear by the way, if you have any examples of work that you’ve made that demonstrate these things, I’d love to hear those. I think it would help ground people in what you’re saying. But also I just love to hear about… I’m a real process nerd – about how you go about trying to create something that genuinely balances those two, like the delivery of the story and genuine freedom, I think that’s really exciting and really hard.
Jenifer Toksvig:
I can tell you in three words: I don’t know. What’s beautiful about The Copenhagen Interpretation in quantum physics is it was put forward as a proposal. It’s not even an official thing. It’s just a name that two physicists gave this notion of what this thing is, and now they disagree on what it means, which pleases me so much because that’s literally the point of it. Everybody who observes a thing has a different experience of it. And I love that.
Voidspace:
That’s beautiful.
Jenifer Toksvig:
Yeah. It’s not even a solid thing in physics that I can point to as it is, which makes me so happy.
Anyway, so the way we do it is, it’s very much about community because it’s everything about the audience, who aren’t an audience, they are participants. They’re not even really participants. We’re all just in a room together. Any of those terms, and we’ve never quite found the right one, implies that, here’s a thing we’ve set up, and you engage with it in a certain way. But that’s not true. We have more in common with a village hall, where if you imagine that all of the things that you’d expect in a village hall are happening simultaneously.
And if you come in, you might find that you’re at a jumble sale, because I’ve knitted some stuff and I’m like, look, the stuff on that table I’ve knitted because I needed to fidget. So just help yourself. You might find you’re at a knitting circle because I’m knitting. You might find you’re at a conversation about something to do with the local area that really matters, like ecology. You might find that when you walk into that village hall, you’re at a completely different thing from the rest of us. I’m just opening up the… I know I should have all of this in my head, but I absolutely don’t.
Voidspace:
Brilliant. That’s absolutely fine. No, feel free to look up whatever you need.
Jenifer Toksvig:
The intentions of all of our projects with The Copenhagen Interpretation in its broadest form, which is very expensive and no one ever lets me do, is we care about things like access. We care about access and inclusion.
The first thing I will ask you is, what do you need to be in the room to be able to engage with this? Or not even be in the room. Do you need remote access? You can have it. Do you want just a letter? Do you want a phone call? You can have it. You can have it at a time that suits you.
Because we’re in a location and it’s local, so we go to the local community and we say, “We’d like to talk to you about this thing we make. We’ve got this story. If you want to make it, you make it in your own way, you make it to the extent that you have local resources, and to the extent that whoever wants to be involved in it does whatever interests them about it, and that’s it. So if it doesn’t involve the story, that’s great. We’ve got this fictional island, but if all you’re interested in is the flowers that grow on your island, then we’re happy to hear about that, and we don’t need to tell you the story, and that’s wonderful.”
Then it becomes part of this wonderful ecosystem that is very naturally resourced from these places that we go. Access and inclusivity is that, but it’s also your traditional, you know, we care about… and I’m no expert in, you know, I talk about how I work in access in theatre, and people ask me about sign language, and I’m no expert in any of those things. But I know they’re required, and I know people who know how to be an expert in them. So that stuff goes without saying. If you’re a sign language user, that will be made available to you. Anything that anybody needs is there, and we try and make it available regardless of if somebody’s asked for it, so that the environment you’re coming into already makes provision for you in some way.
And of course, it’s impossible to do that for everybody. We do our best. And what we say to people is, there’s going to be a room full of people who have diverse needs, and we’re all going to try and do our best for everyone. And that’s just how that will work. We all try and do our best.
I like to think of it… I don’t like to think of it this way, but I can think of it this way – this is how my neurodivergent brain works: if I was in a plane and it came down, but everybody survived, and then you have those people. Those are the people you have.
Voidspace:
That’s what you’ve got. Completely.
Jenifer Toksvig:
That’s what you’ve got. We do the best we can with whoever happens to be there. That’s a really terrible way of putting it, but it’s true.
So Behavioural sciences is the other thing we look at. We look at what agency the individual has within community settings, what agency communities assume they have, what agencies are allowed by communities. And we try and just be obvious and address them. We try and say, it’s great to say, “We’re noticing this here. We’re noticing there’s an aversion to something, or we’re noticing there’s an embracing of something.” So we try and consider those things.
And we capture data as we go. So part of our process is to encourage people to feel free to express themselves if they want to, and then to capture that if they think it’s useful.
So we have a thing called Accompanying. So you can have an Accompanist with you, and that person might just show you where the loos are. They might be one of those people who’s already mapped the experience and they go, “Jen, I’ll accompany, I’ll show you where all the best bits are.”
It might be that I say to my Accompanist, “I do not want any surprises. I can’t handle surprises.” And they know, and they can help me avoid them.
An Accompanist can be anybody from the friend you came with to a professional person we have trained to do accompanying. It can be anything from therapy, guiding, to personal shopping type stuff, to butlering type stuff. It can be anything you want that helps you have the kind of experience you want, and also tends to deepen your experience because there’s someone there going, “How do you feel about that thing that just happened?”.
Voidspace:
I would love that. Sometimes – it’s probably an AuDHD thing – I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sensory input, or choice of activities, in an experience. At those moments I get a complete executive function freeze, and it can be quite upsetting. If there could be someone there with me in those moments just to say, “Okay, which thing are we going to do? Why don’t we focus on that one? And look, this is what this is about”. That would be amazing, for me.
Jenifer Toksvig:
They could also say, “If you’ve got eight things that you care about and we don’t have the time to address them all right now, just tell me the eight things. I’ll write them down.”
Voidspace:
That would be wonderful. For there to be no sense of judgement, or that you’re doing it wrong for needing that. That’s the thing.
Jenifer Toksvig:
That. There’s no judgement and there’s no shame. There is shame throughout theatre in so many ways. There is shame in immersive theatre, there is shame in interactive theatre, there is shame in interactive gaming. There is shame, shame, shame all over the place. It is the strongest rule set we have. When we apply it, because it gets applied inadvertently and deliberately everywhere all the time.
Voidspace:
It’s such as a strong driver of human behaviour, isn’t it? Moving away from that is so valuable.
Jenifer Toksvig:
Yeah. The whole purpose of Copenhagen is to try and identify where shame is inadvertently happening and to see if we can counter it so that it doesn’t happen.
Voidspace:
That is the dream. Amazing. I’m actually having a really strong emotional response to this because, again, I love all this stuff, but so often I have found points in shows – even shows by people I love – where it can be hard.
I’ve realised I have to be careful about the mood I’m in, who I go with, the crowd around me, so many environmental factors, because on a bad day, for whatever reason, you’re right, that sense of shame and that sense of screwing up is so overwhelming.
Maybe for neurodiverse individuals as well, who maybe experience a lot of shame at just not quite getting what those unspoken rules were until you’ve trespassed them. You know?
Jenifer Toksvig:
We live a life that revolves around avoiding shame. It’s a big thing for us. And here’s the thing, I think in theatre, a lot of the language that’s used in the theatre industry and the gaming industry is about the theatre industry and the gaming industry. It’s about the theatre. It’s not about participants. It’s not about the human beings. It’s about craft.
Not that I don’t care about these things. I’ve studied craft. I’ve studied writing. I’ve worked in theatre all my life. I’ve worked backstage, I’ve worked front of house, I’ve done choreography, I’ve done performance. I’ve done flies. I’ve done light, sound. I’ve done all of them. I’ve done design. I’ve done everything that you can do in theatre. I grew up in rep. I grew up in a regional theatre in the days when a repertory theatre, a local rep, had a full-size paint frame and a carpentry workshop that built the sets. I’ve done those things. And so I have some knowledge of all of those aspects. And I’ve also done a lot of gaming. So I have some knowledge of that stuff, too. And all of our language is around… it’s the story that matters.
See, I’m saying these things and people find those… Even I go, well, of course, it’s the story that matters, but it isn’t the story that matters.
Voidspace:
You’ve just spent a good 10 minutes making a really compelling argument for why the story doesn’t necessarily matter…
Jenifer Toksvig:
The thing is, it does matter, right? Of course it matters. But what happens is: we try and control the story, and story is so powerful that it will come out regardless of what we do. It will be present regardless. So all you need is a group of people, and you just need to say a little bit of information into a room like, this is the setting, this is the situation. And then the story just does it for itself because it’s inside all of us anyway.
[The gathering of a fairytale moment happened here. Jenifer has a one-on-one piece of theatre where she sits down with one other person, and she gathers a moment in a story from them. A story they already know, usually a fairytale, and a moment in that story which stands out to them, for some reason.]
We just talked about a very personal story to you, and obviously we’re not going to say what it was, but it took a couple of minutes, and all I did was ask you to pick a story. I didn’t say, “let’s pick a story that has real meaning to you”. Then I asked you to talk about a bit of that story, but I didn’t specify what. I just said, “what bit do you want to talk about?” And what happened was, in the space of just a couple of minutes, you said something that you say is very personal to you that you have never been that articulate about.
And story does that, and space holding can do that. So story is inside all of us. It manifested itself without you choosing. It did the work. I did not control it. You did not control it. I just asked the question, name a story. Story is so powerful that if we give it the freedom to be free and have agency, it attaches itself to us and manifests itself, whether we want it to or not, whether we choose or not. When we try and control it, then it becomes unsatisfying for us in many ways, because we’re trying to do the work that the story wants to do itself.
There’s this lovely story of a poet – Ruth Stone – who used to say that when she was a child, she’d be out in the fields playing, and she would hear and see a poem coming at her across the fields, and she would have to race for the house to get to a pen and paper to be able to write it down by the time it came into her and wanted to be released onto the paper. And she would say that sometimes she didn’t quite make it in time, but she would reach out and grab the poem by its tail, and then it would come out of her backwards onto the paper.
It’s a lovely analogy for me because I think stories are just out there and they come through us. When you read a book, it goes through you. When you watch a movie, it goes through you. But the things that stick with you, some things catch on the Velcro that’s inside us, the barbs that make us who we are.
Some bits of the story catch on those and tear off and stay inside us. And that’s what happened just now, is I said to you, pick a story and the story came out of you because it caught on you when you heard it, or when you knew it, or when a barb appeared, a new barb appeared, and the old stories that you have inside you, because we all have all of the old stories inside us, they rummage around inside us and bits of them catch on the sharp and the sticky parts that are inside us. And that’s what happened just now. And that’s what story does.
So by trying to control a story in terms of… I mean, I am a playwright. I’m not insulting these things. But when I take a story and I shape it into dialogue, and then I am also a director, so I stage it, and I am also a performer, so I choose how to speak the lines. And when I do all these things, and I love all these things, and I have respect for all these things, and they are all crafts, I am making choices to deliver a story in a specific way. And even then, things will catch on the barbs inside the audience.
But it’s so controlled, and it doesn’t have to be. And what happens is we forbid people from being inside that space. We make it so that there are some people who can’t even come into that space and experience that stuff with us. And therefore, we disbar them from having access.
So what I try and do is I say, look, let’s make it so that the work we’re doing is to be able to get everybody connected, engaged in the way they want to be engaged, at the time they want to be engaged, in the place they need to be with all the stuff they need. Let’s make everybody be as comfortable as possible. And then drop a little bit of story in the room, and it will be enough, because story will just do its own work.
Voidspace:
That is such a beautiful explanation. Thank you.
I’d love to hear a bit more about The Broad Cloth.
Jenifer Toksvig:
It’s a fictional island whose main industry is the manufacturer of broadcloth, which is a textile. It’s made in the Hebrides very traditionally as Harris Tweed. It’s that cloth. It’s very waterproof, wonderful, and made in the old-fashioned way, which they don’t use anymore. It has lots of lovely process aspects to it. You can tell I’m a crafter, and I really care about that. So it’s a woollen cloth, so they have sheep. And so now you understand, it’s a small island where they sheep and they make cloth. And that’s the situation of it. And as soon as I say that, it’s easy to imagine where one might place oneself in that community. We have a ‘no tech’ sort of rule, not that it’s in the past, but that they have to rely on minimal tech because weather and getting supplies to the island is difficult sometimes.
Voidspace:
There’s no signal out there.
Jenifer Toksvig:
Yeah, all of that stuff. You can imagine what that’s like. So we effectively lay the transparency of that fictional island over real islands and invite the community to imagine what it would be like if it was their island.
And there is a sketchy story. So we have three main characters that appear everywhere, and all of the rest of the community is open to invention. And those characters are very loosely scribed. So there’s a person who leads the community, whatever they want to call that person, whoever that person is, there’s someone who leads. Then there’s a person that is about to come of age, and their relationship to the leader of the community is that the leader is the guardian or the guide or the parent or something. So it’s a two-person household. And then there’s an elder of some kind who isn’t just an elder in the community. And those three people say, you must have a leader, a person who’s about to come of age, and an elder. And the leader must be related to the person who’s about to come of age in terms of being responsible for them in some way.
And that’s it. And then we work with the local community to discover who those people might be, and find out more about them, and who the other characters are.
And the event we have, because we do have an event, is that this person is about to come of age and there will be a coming-of-age ceremony. And the thing we do set up is that there are some traditions on the island that are scribed by us, and one of them is that coming-of-age ceremony. So in the old-fashioned way of making broadcloth, the last stages of it are that you put the cloth in a big loop around a long wooden table and you move the cloth back and forwards across the wood, and it felts it in a way. It’s called fulling.
Voidspace:
That’s how you felt. Okay.
Jenifer Toksvig:
It’s one way of felting. There’s lots of ways. In order to have it felted, everybody sits around the table and they move their bit of cloth backwards and forwards. But in order to have it… we’ve all got different strengths in our arms. So you move your bit back and forth and then you rotate the cloth around. So everybody moves every bit of the cloth and it becomes rhythmic.
So you go forward and back and to the side. And therefore there are songs that they sing. And the whole process is called waulking, W-A-U-L-K-I-N-G. And there are waulking songs. There’s a very famous oral tradition of waulking songs in the Hebrides especially, in Scotland, that have been passed down through generations. Songs that they sing about history or gossip, and some of them are improvised and some of them are set, and they tend to be in a verse/chorus style. So somebody will sing a verse and then everybody sings a chorus that everyone knows.
And it just keeps you going while you’re doing this work, as with any working song, it keeps you going and it’s amazing.
So I have taken that waulking song tradition and I have invented a tradition whereby the people in this community believe that what you sing into a cloth during a coming of age ceremony, your family makes the best bolt of broadcloth that can for you, and it’s waulked by people who are important to you in the community and important to the community.
And instead of singing folklore, songs, history, whatever, gossip, you sing blessings into the cloth, and they believe that the blessings are real and they become true. And there’s all kinds of set up around that tradition. So we give that tradition as a thing that is set within the community. So that’s how we stitch story in. We stitch in folklore tradition rather than occurrence. And we have an event rather than an outcome. And we don’t know what happens. We haven’t done it yet. Don’t ask me. We haven’t done it.
Voidspace:
Fair enough.
Jenifer Toksvig:
So the set-up is that over time we do stuff online, we do Zoom sessions, and little bits of environmental stuff gets stitched in. So we say things that are true of the island, like the weather and stuff, like supplies and things. We can have opportunities to stitch that stuff in. And we develop all of this with the community we’re working with. So really, we give them an almanac of truths about the stuff, and they then stitch their own, they weave their own cloth with those things.
Voidspace:
Amazing. That sounds beautiful. Is it only open to participation for the particular members of those communities?
Jenifer Toksvig:
No. There’s an island in the Bristol channel, which is called Lundy. Lundy Island in the Bristol channel has a Facebook group of fans of Lundy, people who’ve been going there for holidays for many years. If you think you’re part of the community in that place, and they think you’re part of the community, you’re welcome to participate. If you want to just come and experience it or you want to join, you want to be part of it, you’re welcome. There’s no boundaries to it. We also have a digital island where we play this story out on Discord, and if you want to come and join the digital island, you’re welcome to. It’s another retelling of the same story. There are many retellings of the same story. If you want to just do it with your family, you can. If you want to pretend you live on Bornholm, which is the Danish island that we’ve been working with, then you can pretend you live there. There’s no rules.
Voidspace:
Of course not. Amazing. Well, that just sounds fascinating. It’s interesting how you say, how you’ve gone for the folklore. I’m very interested in folklore and folk traditions. I used to be a reenactor before I found immersive theatre. That was my past obsession. I remember what my favourite thing, really, I wasn’t actually that into the actual battles or whatever. But the thing I loved more than anything was sitting around the campfire at the end of the day and singing songs, and often songs, not necessarily traditional songs, but songs that became our traditions. And drawing from and adding to that kind of store, I think, with any group… and because we were in this historical-ish context, and we had our own longhall in Kent, which we’d built together, there was a really obvious connection. It made plain the connection between what we think of as folklore and history, and the stories that we are creating together about ourselves, and about our own communities, all the time.
Jenifer Toksvig:
And so the song, when we do this event, the song that’s sung around the table is improvised by the people who are there, and it doesn’t matter if you think you can’t sing. It doesn’t matter if you think you can’t rhyme. It doesn’t matter what you say. What you say and what you sing is exactly the right thing.
And it’s never expected to be repeated, but if it gets repeated because it gets learned, because it gets love, that’s wonderful.
So what you’re saying is exactly right. If people get together because they want to reenact a certain battle, there will be some people who just want to come and sing the songs, and that is legitimately a way they can be engaged. And if it was me, I would be the same, and I wouldn’t know who was fighting whom, and I wouldn’t know the story, and I wouldn’t care about the stories, and that is fine, is what theatre should be, because theatre is still… That’s musicals, and I say everything I write is a musical because you’re still singing songs that tell stories. That’s what it is.
We should never say, “Oh, you can only join in if you live on this island”. Here are the intentions that we have. Engage people around access, and also, as I said, behavioural sciences is what we’re interested in. But we’re interested in connections, making and maintaining connections between individuals, between community groups, but also with ourselves, with our own selves, which is what we just experienced very briefly with the story that we spoke about.
We’re interested in craft, particularly heritage crafts, a particular focus on textiles and paper and stuff, mixed media, because that’s my interest, but any and all crafts.
We’re interested in ecology and the impacts of climate change. We’re interested in the land and our connection to the land and our relationship with the land.
We’re interested in folk traditions, especially around music and community gathering in that way, and food as well. I love food.
We’re interested in heritage, the unique heritage of these places and these people, and the modern heritage, the contemporary heritage, as well as the past.
And we’re interested in the future. So we’re interested in different models of governance and value. We’re interested in different economic models. We’re interested, particularly for community groups and organisations, to have stability going into the future. Everything is so uncertain at the moment. This is a great way to allow story to give us the opportunity to talk about different political models, different economic models. If they’re interested in that, we look at local governance, if they’re interested in that.
So we don’t just say, this is theatre, you can only join in if you’re into theatre. We say, hello, local government, what’s your interest in this? How can you see yourselves reflected within this story world? If they’re interested and they want to engage, then that’s a good place to make some explorations of different models and different ways that communities… There are wonderful island communities that are self-governing, that are exploring new methods of dealing with the economy, and we look at all of those things as well.
So we have Navigators of economy. We have Navigators of economy, we have Navigators of ecology, we have wonderful connections with people on the Isle of Wight where we’ve been doing some work, who are just all about saving the world, one shell at a time. And that’s stuff that we’re interested in.
We’re not interested in going, this is a play, it’s got a political message, we’re going to stage it to minute detail, you have to come and sit still and focus on it the whole time. To me, that’s not… It’s not okay for most people. At some point, in some way, theatre is inaccessible for literally everyone.
Voidspace:
Absolutely.
Jenifer Toksvig:
You know, people who have migraines, people who are just in a bad mood that day, but they’ve booked the tickets, you know?
Voidspace:
Absolutely. What advice would you give to people early in their careers, or aspiring creators of any kind, professional or otherwise?
Jenifer Toksvig:
I think look for the things that we assume are unchangeable, and then think about why, and look at what they’re preventing you from doing, that you want to do. Look at whom they’re preventing from joining you. And then… stop doing them.
Voidspace:
Beautiful. That is absolutely amazing. I’m going to end there because that’s such a lovely note to finish it on. Thank you.
Find out more about Jenifer Toksvig’s work here .
Jenifer will be bringing The Fairytale Library to Voidspace Live 2025. Get your ticket here.