 OK, Hekimish. So, ydych chi'n gydig llwyddoedd, rydyn ni'n cael ei ddweud. Rydyn ni i fi'n gael i'r ddechrau. Rydyn ni'n Lserr Aeturner. Rydyn ni'n gael i'r ddechu'r ddechu'r ddechu'r diolethefnol ar y Paul Mellan centre ffyrdd yng Nghymru. Rydyn ni i fi fod i'n gael i'n gael i ddweud yng nghymru o ddweud i'r lunciol 2021. Efallai oed yn ddodol yn eich ddweud o ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, oeslaet gyda bod ni'n gwybod llawer y nafOC ac mae fy ysgawdd sy'n dda, fail angen gynnal juen oherwydd sy'n cael cysyllt ond rydym sydd elrellnol nhw wedi bod gennym eu geiru Frances구나 Chynderolol a g недnu a ddim wel scale ac mae allan mustard Aid provided ar siwyddo o dda a gwag yn gwybod ar y celfiwyr hwn. The Paul Madden Centre is a research institute and educational charity. We're based in Bedford Square in central London and we're part of Yale University. Whilst we're closed due to Covid restrictions, you can interact with us online through our publications, our events and our collections. Let me walk you through the format of this online seminar today before we start and I introduce Hamish Muir. I'll just read through these house keeping guidelines which you hopefully can all see online. You're automatically muted when you join the webinar and you can only communicate verbally if the host unmute you, which can happen during the Q&A session which will be off the Hamish's talk. The talk will last roughly for 40 minutes, given take and it'll be followed by a question and answer session and discussion and we really want you to get involved and interact and I know Hamish is really keen to hear your feedback and your questions so really do you make the most of that opportunity after the presentation. So how do you ask questions? Well you use the virtual raise hand button which you will see at the bottom of your screen if you have questions or a comment to make and you want to speak and Danny who's helping us today our events assistant will unmute you so that you can interact with myself and with Hamish. If you don't want to speak that's absolutely fine you can type your question and please do that in the Q&A box. You can do that at any point during Hamish's talk so if something comes to you as he's speaking please put that question in the box and we'll come back to it and after the presentation during the Q&A session and what I'll do is I'll read out your question to Hamish because other people can't see what you've written and so I'll read it out and we'll get to that in the discussion. You can also use the chat box if you've got any problems, if you've got any questions or you just want to say hello and again I think we're all craving ways to connect with other researchers and other people so please let's just use this opportunity whilst we're together for this hour to share ideas to share thoughts and discuss things with one another. The session is being recorded today and that gives people who can't make it at this time a chance to to watch the presentation and hear about Hamish's research and please don't take photographs during this time that just is to respect the speaker's presentation and images that he's using in the talk and any offensive behaviour will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host and so without further ado let me introduce today's speaker. Hamish Muir is a PhD researcher investigating sustainable and ecological theatre at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Hamish's research focuses on playwriting and waste, particularly the role of script in its relationship with the production of sustainable theatre and how waste can be used to question assumptions of theatre practices, aesthetics and meaning. His background is in civil engineering at Imperial College and art history at Christie's education. Hamish has worked at several museums and auction houses in London and Edinburgh. He's also an independent artist, a playwright and a sustainability consultant. In 2017 Hamish established a production studio Arctic Lion which creates a sustainable experimental performance. So Hamish welcome, thank you so much for starting off at this term's event and we're all really looking forward to hearing your ideas. I know you're such an innovative thinker and practitioner and I think this is an issue which feels so alive as we're all pondering the future of performance and craving to be back together in theatre buildings and interacting and watching performances live. So I know you're going to talk through many of those challenges and issues which are really hot topics at the moment. So I'll hand over to you and then we'll join each other again for the Q&A session after your talk. Great, well thank you so much Sarah and it's a pleasure to be speaking here today to all of you and thank you for joining. I'm just going to share my screen now and I hope you can all see that but happy new year everybody and this is a really great way to kick off 2021. Today I'm going to be talking about my research in the environmental sustainability of theatre. Sustainability has been a growing topic of importance within the performing arts given the awareness and urgency of action that needs to be taken to combat the effects of climate change. My focus has been on the London theatre industry primarily and what you could arguably call conventional or traditional stage-based forms of theatre. Today I want to give you a brief introduction to my wider research area and then focus on a particular question that I'm working on at the moment around the role of the play script and I'll discuss a few historical examples, some of my own experiments and if time permits and if you'll indulge me I'll end with a very brief reading from one of those scripts before we open up for questions. So the way that I tend to start discussing this issue is from a fairly pragmatic position. Theatre set designs are these bespoke, conglomerated, sculptural constructions that are very difficult to reuse and recycle and sadly they can often become waste material ending in landfill or incineration. They're very complex sculptures charged with intellectual property, a specific relationship between actor and audience and there's an almost built-in in adaptability because they're made for a very specific place and purpose and moment and time and to some extent if the stage design is too adaptable to other performances it loses some of its production value and this is of course a very interesting and important contradiction almost to discuss within a sphere of sustainability and adaptability. I put up this design by Rob Hull at the Old Vic which I went to see a few years ago and it was a really beautiful design rich in detail and again I felt really captured this sort of building a very specific atmosphere for a very specific place in time and but of course it's very difficult to define what a conventional set design looks like or what talk about set design or scenography in broad term so this is just simply one example of that. But as a consequence and despite a lot of theatres really engaging with issues of sustainability and wanting to change theatre generates a significant amount of waste not a not significant amount in comparison to say the construction industry but in principle from my perspective I don't think it matters so much about the tonnage it's the principle and whether there are creative opportunities from that. The image you're looking at now is an array of photos that I took at the National Theatre in 2019 when I was doing some field work there following a production from beginning to end. I produced a set of these photos twice a week over the course of the production and there's a sort of absurdity to these images an intentional absurdity finding value in devalued material and you know was trying to look at waste as an almost archaeological descriptor of behaviour because you can tell a lot about somebody or somewhere by looking in their bin basically and to some extent what I'd like to theorise is that waste can be treated as almost the subconscious of theatre in the sense that it is suppressed material it is the backstage material it is the periphery material the subtextual material and in this sense we can tell a lot about what theatre considers to be valuable and what theatre considers to be beautiful. Starting from that documentation of waste and employing the design philosophy of the circular economy which is to do with redesigning the production process in order to avoid the creation of waste I've attempted in my own work to redesign the total art of theatre holistically in terms of costume backstage the setting the stage itself the auditorium the production process and the conception of character and narrative for a zero waste ecologically conscious theatre and again the holistic nature of that is very important to me but that's a sort of general summary of some of the broader area and field that I'm interested in and I feel that's quite important to contextualise before we go any further but the central focus is really to do with what role does the script have to play in all of this and whether the script can embody some of these ideas the script exists in general exists at the beginning of the conceptual process and so it can define boundary conditions and initial intentions it can also critique some of the ideas as well particularly the pragmatism that I've already kind of alluded to as the underpinnings of approaches such as the circular economy must be looked at critically and impartially and you know I'm not necessarily advocating as that that's the only way or the best way because the circular economy is a sort of top down system-based design approach and so it has to be treated with scrutiny and I think what is a really important aspect of the play script in that respect is that it can simultaneously present an approach and critique that approach by applying different tones and genres and as and so in the case of the circular economy it can outline what that might look like speculatively but also suggest some of the the flaws or leave it up for interpretation not offer it as an answer so to some extent my research is really investigating the notion of redesigning the script rather than redesigning the stage albeit I'm very interested in that reciprocal relationship between the page and the stage and today you know I want to give some some some key examples of that relationship and as I said at the beginning the the aspect that I'm working on currently is to do with considering the play script as an art object and whether treating the script in such terms has an impact on the form of the theatre that it can produce in other words by changing the page how does that change the stage if at all and in terms of an ecological and sustainable theatre the script has the ability to communicate what is staged and the way in which it is staged that's kind of the aspect that I'm particularly interested in in terms of the ethics of that because sometimes the the means and the ends can be incongruous basically if for instance if a theatre production has a strong environmental message but it produces a significant amount of toxic waste in order to say that message there's a conflict there but by rewriting the script to put more focus on the potential architectural constructive material and spatial aspects of the drama I think the script can offer a new agency to sustainable production and extend the total art of theatre to include technical material and ethical construction and in so doing communicate to a plurality of different stakeholders and offer new ways of thinking about staging theatre. I briefly want to say that an experimental interest in the page and writing that's treated as an art object can be found in many other disciplines to theatre such as concrete poetry musical scores architectural drawings and text based art and but from my initial discussion with theatre archives there's not the same sort of tradition in theatre playwriting and this is mainly due to the fact that the script is a means to an end and a lot of theatre makers will know this already the script is a blueprint it's it's not a refined document it's a it's a sketch that is only drafted and redrafted and corrected and doodled on really and most working scripts evolve as the theatre production is staged as different production companies stage them and so there's a huge deviation and metamorphosis that goes on in this very collaborative process which is so important to theatre as well this is Henry Irving's prompt book and it shows some some drawings and notes that that he's put on for Hamlet and so there are there are other voices that are added to the script all the way along the process but I think that still fundamentally even though there is a gulf between the page and the stage there is still a significance to consider in terms of what is and what is not present on the page and how certain writing encourages certain conditions for staging even though there is a lot of a lot to be interpreted and improvised from that position I feel it's also important to say that there is an industry standard to the script format in in a lot of cases particularly if it's been pitched to a company and the typography and insets and the graphic design and the font are all sort of well defined and established in that respect and and that can make this question around the script as an art object quite quite tricky in some ways this is a screenshot of what comes up if you google play script notation and I'll direct directly to the bottom line where it says if you submit your new play to anyone they will not read it if it's not in the proper format now of course in many ways there's nothing wrong with having standards and accepted ways of working for all sorts of reasons but equally there's a huge potential area of creative experimentation that's not being explored here and and being a being sort of at the edge of convention and questioning conventions is surely what art is all about but I'll I'll say no more because that's a very broad claim and and hope you forget that by the q&a session so theorising the play script can be difficult because it's a means to an end scholarship can focus on the theatre that is produced or the purely literary aspects of the script it can the play script can sort of exist in between all sorts of different forms and it can exist at different points within the production process as well it can be purely a conceptual experiment it can be a text that is sold or pitched to a theatre company and it can be a retrospective document such as these illustrated editions which to some extent become entirely separated from the theatre that they produce their historical documentations of the performance and and simply and practically another means of revenue for for writers and theatre makers there's also a tradition around the closet drama which is a script that is supposed to be read and not to be staged and that's really its own art form and is you know it's become associated with particular genres and audiences these are images from Robert Massin's 1966 graphic designs based on Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and Massin kind of goes in the opposite direction to what I'm talking about today and instead of going from page to stage he's translated the stage to the page and there's a clear interest in the page as a visual object and the layout of the characters and the speech in relation to each other but it exists after the performance and almost dips into the realm of graphic novels or comic strips where the page is used to make visual jokes that would not translate to the stage so this is very much an end in itself like an illustrated edition or or a closet drama conversely the the national theatre archive pointed out these really interesting examples to me where the script is the stage or the script is the performance on the left is a show called the total immediate collective imminent terrestrial salvation it's a very catchy title where a script is a in the centre of the stage and different actors come forth and read a section of it so it's a form of reader's theatre and it produces a sort of polyphonic performance but the script is used as a prop and is very sort of explicit on the page and the action of the of the theatre is around reading the script the action of reading becomes the performance basically on the right hand side is bagshaw and thawps the shape of pain where they experimented with with captioning a creative captioning approach and turned the script into into the set design to some extent so the words are projected onto the surfaces onto the set design and onto the actors as the words are being delivered this is a rather kind of on the nose link between the page and the stage but i think it's a really creative example and at least worthy of note much of the examples of the script that i've found that treat the page differently are to do with voice and delivery and perhaps it's it's also important to say it's very specifically the actors voice i'd like to return to this idea a bit later on as i feel that the script is not just for actors and directors and there are you know there are examples here which i'm showing that spatialize voice and use the space of the page to indicate certain focus points or orientations and and that could give a sense of the the space but in general it is it is more of an internal space rather than anything explicitly sort of physical or indeed environmental role. Samuel Beckett of course is a is a major figure a big example here who's used the page to create different conditions for staging this is an extract from quad which is a sort of balletic mathematical sequencing of movement that was written for television and Beckett's sort of exploring staging geometry here and he employs a more technical language and makes the script into a more almost didactic and directive document using anonymous actor names just one two three and four and there's a real interest in in pattern and permutation and very specific directions about lighting sound timing the physical build of the actors and the stage dimensions themselves so that everything can be can can sort of build together into a climactic rhythm and be in unison and the the simplicity of the directions do allow for a lot of interpretation of course but to me I think there seems to be Beckett seems to be playing with the idea of how much control over the stage can the page have or does it have an the idea of and when Beckett staged quads it developed into lots of different variations and versions and there were a lot of revisions to the script it was initially for two actors and then for four Beckett deemed the initial configuration on the page was it was quite impractical as actors had to cross paths with each other and would bump into each other and not be able to keep to the proposed sequential timing of it all which was dependent on the lighting and the music and and all of the other stage conditions. Aside from the other sort of themes that Beckett might be exploring here in terms of futility or entrapment which might have a very resonance with with 2020 and 2021 at the moment to me there seems to be an interest in in free will and self-determination by the very plain dictatorial directions and an interest in the stage as a mechanism for action and a mechanism for pattern and music making with humans actors being almost used as instruments in space and whilst it is also very collaborative and and again it is very open to other other voices being involved in this process it's it to some extent is the opposite to to improvisation I would say the next example is a dance score by Anna Halperin and this addresses movement in space and is a much more ritualistic practice like Beckett it is it's fairly directive but again very collaborative we see a bird's eye view of different choreographic orientations of the actors and dancers moving in these kind of mandala shapes and these diagrams are almost like architectural technical drawings and attempt to express a sense of tone or mood through the formation of actors in plan view. Halperin talks about about this as a moving art form and that it is very open and participatory it shifts from directing the voice to directing the body and and that's obviously because it's a choreographic exercise but these simple formations allow the dance to be explained easily and performed by anyone. Halperin asks each participant each dancer to express a motivation that is important to them whatever topic or person or issue that that they are passionate about and and they are motivated and perform this this dance with with that individual motivation. There's also an explicitly environmental agenda with this as it is seasonal performance and takes place at a specific mountain site in nature and has an awareness of nature so there is an ecological action taking place here but to me it's unclear really whether it is a sustainable action as it requires people moving in shapes that can for instance damage the soil and simply being in nature and being aware of nature does not necessarily help to conserve nature and whilst it is a very open and democratic process and performance the simple mandala shape means there is not much room for interpretation and it still can be taken quite literally in its intentions from from page to stage. The work of Sarah Kane is also really interesting in in this context as well particularly her play 4.48 psychosis which was staged posthumously. She specifically employs an ambiguity in the text and uses the page to express some of these themes using the page to express the themes in the play. For instance she doesn't make explicit which characters should say the lines in the script at times and she completely deviates from playwriting convention such as using an abstracted array of numbers which you can see at the bottom there and this is sort of displayed in one of the middle of the pages as a suggestion of the character's state of mind at that point but it's very open for interpretations and her stage directions or lack of stage directions are really there almost to challenge actors and directors to decode and treat the text in a different non-literal way. She makes the actors and directors do more of the interpretive work. Theatre of course is steeped in a tradition of reinterpretation finding new meaning and new representations in play scripts that can be 500 years old but perhaps as a counterpoint almost to Beckett's quad and Halprins planetary dance 4.48 psychosis is the opposite of a directive text but you know as I've sort of alluded to before the play script is never really dictatorial and rightly rightly so there's a gulf of reinterpretation and evolution and so but I think what is significant here and is that Sarah Kane doesn't outline expectations. She creates the conditions for different sorts of conversations and improvisations to be had about the staging and to me this opening up of the dialogue between the page and the stage has a huge creative potential for sustainable theatre. The most intriguing example that I've found that tries to employ an entirely new vocabulary in the script and express the page stage and voice and motivation almost simultaneously are these geometric designs by David Cole and he outlines four key characteristics of what constitutes a play script in his mind. Firstly it must be material that actors can work with individually or as a group there has to be some specification about the performance space. There has to be some basis for establishing a relationship between the actors and there must be some means to arrive at a sequence of incidents. To some extent it has a narrative although I don't think Cole would use the term narrative and is more interested in sequence. Cole sees these geometric shapes as exercises for actors to improvise from for instance in the top left diagram he says to two actors improvise a scene between two people the dynamics of whose relationship are shown by this shape. Cole says that actually this doesn't fulfill each of his four characteristics that I just outlined as it doesn't give a sense of the setting or the context that the actors are within and it doesn't outline a sequence of instances either and so he goes on to develop these other geometries which for him give more of a gesture towards sequential progress and also the spatial relationship between characters so for instance in the bottom right diagram 23 where each node on on the shape represents a character and the lines between those characters represent the relationship physically and to some extent psychologically to those to the other characters and and as as you can see he's sequenced the shapes from one to five and so there would be a there would be a sequence of incidences going from there. Cole's later experiment takes a buddhist meditative symbol of harmony and symmetry known as a yntra and he asks the actor to do one of two things either pick out four points on the diagram as you can see in the middle there and these are just points that the actor is kind of intuitively drawn to and and then and then those are separated as you can see below the diagram one two three and four or the actor can draw a geometry within the within the yntra shape and this is in order to develop a sequence of geometric shapes which you can see in the diagram on the right and these will be a means to to improvise from define the setting space and the relationship between the characters. Now there are a few issues that I have with Cole's theory of the script for him the script is primarily for actors and and directors to some extent and as a motivation to be inspired from and and as I said earlier I think that the script in terms of sustainable theatre should not just be for actors it should be able to communicate to a right range of stakeholders within theatre on the stage and backstage what the actors say in front of the audience is is the tip of the iceberg of what the art of theatre is and can be and there's so much potential for poetry and artistry and creativity to be employed within the script that speaks to different aspects of of theatre and very much including the ethics of the production process. Also Cole subscribes to moving away from the script as a literary medium which has characterized a lot of post-traumatic theatre and and different sorts of theatre practices in the 20th and 21st century but again my stance personally is that the script should not dispense of its literary creativity because because it can be used to communicate different messages with different audiences in a in a very complex poetic and a nuanced way. So I've given you a few examples of broadly you know quite quite sort of canonical examples to some extent of writers who've used the script in a different way and critique them a little bit but I'm going to I'm going to give you some some of my own examples now not the time comparing myself to to those who've come before very much standing on the shoulders of giants but I'm these the these these examples I've I've tried to kind of contend with issues of sustainability and ecology and and use the play script and the page to to explore that and start with the backstage and the stage itself the backstage is generally not present in the script and so I wanted to draw out the theatricality of the backstage and specifically the waist of the backstage in the diagram on the left which I've had to abstract slightly for the purposes of today I've documented the choreography of waist backstage at the national theatre and so measured the movement of waist and skips and bins again there's an intentional absurdity to this and and as I said earlier I think the play script here offers tonal reflections on the approach that I've taken and it almost self-saturises the approach as well which offers kind of different forms of knowledge on the right hand side is a section of the script which I've called notes on staging and to some extent this pictogram represents the set design but it's very much interpretive and non-literal it's supposed to be almost like a Rorschach test where which can be used to symbolise whatever the viewer sees in the image and these these diagrams are staggered throughout the script and basically produce a set design that constructs and then deconstructs by the end of the performance similar to Beckett I've looked at using a more technical language as well within the script that contrasts with a more discursive and poetic dialogue I'm very interested in in that juxtaposition of poetic and technical vocabularies partly because of the background that I come from but this culminated in another absurdist diagram of the entire production process which charts the production of set elements the lines map different design decisions to the construction process incidentally I think this diagram conforms to all four of Cole's descriptors of what constitutes a script it's a material that actors can work from it outlines a relationship between the actors some of whom are non-human and there's a sense of space in that each set element gets a proportional size in relation to their construction and it's fundamentally a timeline a sequence of events as well there are more examples which I'll briefly skip through as well again I wanted to draw on the idea of the play script as a narrative and as a sequence a design process is also a sequence and an evolution and the script can be used as a device to chart and critique and develop that design process the script can also as well play with language grammar alphabet vocabulary in order to refocus the staging towards the material spatial and environmental aspects of the stage playing with the idea of consequence and and questioning convention lastly I'll end with this example picking up on the point that the script is is not just for the actor this is a visual script which are created in 2019 the images chart the supply chain of a piece of plywood which gives a sense of the embodied energy of that material from cradle to grave the accompanying dialogue has a double meaning and the dialogue alone taken off the page is a short poetic monologue delivered by an individual character talking about their sense of self so but when but when put with the images they have a different meaning and so the visuals are saying one story and the words are saying another and and I wanted to try and have this kind of conversation between the images and and the the words on the page the idea being that the people who read the physical script are those who work backstage directors designers stage managers crafts people draft people meanwhile the the audience who would come to see the show they don't see these images and these these images wouldn't necessarily need to reflect the set design or the staging in any way they just would hear the actor alone and and and so again the the point is that I'm trying to communicate to different audiences on different levels and through different through different means and so I will now end with a very short reading if if there is time and as I say if you'll indulge me and then we'll open up for questions this is obviously a bit better in the flesh so I hope there'll be some performative power online but I will read this to you and you have the script in front of you as well we begin at the end buggyed rugged dark bark to rend knotted rotted earth to fend lend me a bowl ear where I pack it a trunk of junk one last look I I know not the law I did not saw hollangs the rung groan and drone and strip and sand scrap log booked and hook it and crooked shaving grace land the veneer of produce hangs up hard hatred noose yet glues welfare spruce coughing carbon shadows of past use splintered future further faster father oh who is me furtive atomic mother I am the word and whistle of the world wind rushing on stage will not be seen on stick page what's heard is the wage I wrote my fate and crate worked my system grist across the sea mark in cedar pine and cypress bark till I had no role no place no face no voice round and round braced a call of the wild taste I end as wooden waste thank you so much for listening to me thank you I'll now open up to questions and back to you Sarah but thank you so much thank you so much hey mate that was absolutely fantastic I really enjoyed it and I think like many people in the audience you enabled us to virtually travel with you to onto the stage and inside some buildings that many of us haven't been able to visit for some time so that was much needed on this January Friday lunchtime just a reminder to our audience that you can raise your hand if you'd like to ask Hamish a question um directly um or you can type it in the Q&A box and and I'll read it out um on your behalf and I think one of the slightly difficult things for speakers in this online environment is that you can't really pick up on the energy of of the room you know people aren't giving you feedback by laughing at your jokes or nodding along enthusiastically but I'm certain people were doing that from home and and we had nearly 50 people join us um who are still with us so that's just really nice to feel again like I said in in my introduction though those connections to people who are really interested in your in your work Hamish but if I could use my chair's privilege to just open the questions up and and start to think about some of the ideas that you you raised in in your presentation um perhaps because I'm a historian of sculpture I was really fascinated um by the way in which you opened your talk um describing theatre sets as bespoke sculptural conglomerations and also as complex sculptures and I just wondered what employing the idea of sculpture does for your argument whether that's sort of conceptually and or materially how you're thinking about these works of art as sculpture in particular and whether you could just open that up a bit um for me and for other people um that'd be really great way to start thank you yes it's a really interesting point actually and um I think that um the the reason why why I kind of use that term is because set designs and and scenography are very difficult to define really because it's such a broad spectrum of different processes and materials and and and and to some extent there doesn't have to be any material so it's it's uh I I think that um to me um sculpting as well can can reflect um some of the range of of the different practices of set designers um and again um there are I think there are some set designers in the audience so please you know um they they would be lovely to hear from them as well they would correct me on this but but um but um uh you know there are there are some designers who prefer to to work um purely through drawing and model making and and not with the physical materials but equally there are there are artists to who who work directly with the materials that end up on skate on stage and um and so um to me I again I I I maybe need to have more of a think about um the way that I'm using the word sculptural but but it was to try and get a sense of that range um but but also to to say that sometimes um the the I mean there is a there's a sort of tradition in theatre of um of um using one material to pretend to be another material materials act and and pretend to be other materials on stage um and again that's you know in a theatre context quite uh you know a broad thing to say I think but but um um but I think that uh it's it's um it's very I think I think again the sculpting and the reason for sculpting and there was a really great exhibition on at the Serpentine gallery by former fantasma I think over sadly it was it was uh over during the pandemic but it was they they made it very accessible and and and there they they worked with wood um they're they're not um theatre designers as far as I know but but um part of their sculpting was to include the the ethical implications of this material and and um I think that is um uh I think ethics again it's uh it's maybe difficult to talk about in very broad terms like that but um but from from my perspective I think um it is it's uh it's almost another um potential area to consider and to for artists and designers to um um push their work in different directions and there's lots of sort of fascinating and interesting examples of that because I think that certainly environmental ethics can be can be quite um quite daunting and quite domineering and or feel quite restrictive and um and so um rephrased I think part of my intention is to try and discuss around rephrasing this as as a um as a creative process. Thank you Henry. Stanley do we have anyone with their hand raised at the moment? Yes we have a Ginny Manning would like to ask a question so I'm just gonna unmute him now. Great thank you. Hello hi Hamish hello Sarah. Hi Hamish that was fascinating thank you so much um I'm just interested um being a playwright and obviously after everything that's happened over the last few months um and how we are reconsidering the state of theatre I think there's quite a big change in how we're approaching theatre and inclusivity and diversity. In terms of making theatre um this idea of including the importance of of everybody involved I think is really relevant could you kind of give me as a theatre maker one piece of advice that kind of as a starting point from what what you've just discussed in terms of um bearing in mind the importance of the script and also bearing in mind the importance of the other craft people like just like a sort of a simple piece of advice of where to start because it's it's obviously based a lot on on all as a as a theatre maker you know um you kind of I'm sure you know this you sort of start off writing for two scripts uh two uh two characters and no and a black box set because you've got no budget um so and as you as you progress then that obviously becomes more more more complex so basically what advice would you give us? Thank you Ginny I think that's a very interesting um question I mean I I think um you know and obviously there's there's not a a correct answer you know one correct answer to to that question but um I I've found uh being in conversation with um uh different people who work in theatre have different roles in theatre and and again the the uh I feel I'm saying the same point again but the complexity of of of theatre with um all sorts of different voices and and you know and and practically you you unfortunately can't talk to everybody and everybody has their own sort of experiences and um uh expertise and and their own voice but I I I find um again particularly in my own work that it's very useful to to just simply start having conversations with uh people that you that um work in theatre in uh different different roles and um um there's often a lot of assumptions and and vocabularies as well that comes out of that I mean at the national theatre I um there were lots of words that that again to people who work in that environment use all the time as a shorthand but I thought it was really just interesting to kind of in terms of a linguistic interest and playwriting interest to to draw out some of those um those words and um the meanings of them so um so so there's there's that aspect I mean I I also um um found just just kind of um uh considering um the the the technical aspects and the the pragmatic aspects has a through a creative lens and and particularly looking at playwrights again Beckett is is the obvious example with with very kind of um almost a technical language but but that's that's I feel um ambiguous and open enough for interpretation and and that kind of simplicity of it I feel resonates with technical forms of theatre um but um but but there is absolutely also nothing wrong with with just starting with with two characters and and in a in a space and um and uh you know I think there's there's absolutely different ways that at different points in the process that you might bring in uh aspects of backstage or materiality or an aspect of materiality I mean if if there's a prop that you want to give to those two two actors what's the what's the history of that prop where where how has that been manufactured and the stories that come out of that and uh following it back so I have a question as well on the Q&A which perhaps feeds into what you're saying so if I can just interject with that and it's from Barbara Hull and she asked um or she says she's interested in how that you see the education of the audience feeding into this argument you know and how what you're saying about sustainability and um I'm just thinking you know you're talking there to someone who's a playwright and a theatre maker but then sort of in this sort of 3d aspect that you're talking about what's the role of the audience within this yeah um it's a really it's a really um good point and I think that um you know that for um my own my own research I'm um you know to some extent I'm quite interested in um a theatre that is sort of implicitly sustainable that as per the the um reading at the end that the audience doesn't necessarily um obviously know because I think again environmental or ecological theatre can be a a type of theatre and it can have these expectations and it can be um quite didactic in in some respects and so it's um but but that's not to say that the audience don't have a part to play and and and I think that what I said um in the example of if a theatre production has an environmental message but it produces it in a in an an environmental way um I think that there is there is such a an opportunity for um um the audience to kind of engage with what a theatre is beyond just what they see on the stage um the example that I always think of um which isn't really to do with environmentalism but um uh there was a production of Peter Pan uh up here in Edinburgh and um um uh there was a um in the in the programme um there was a piece about uh this prop that was used on stage which was a patchwork quilt which the theatre company had engaged with um uh this charity for um orphans and one of the themes of the play was lost boys and and and that so there was a real resonance between how the theatre was produced and um and and the themes that were in this kind of fictional context and and I just loved that reality and and fiction um and I think that again there's there's so much scope for that and and having the and uh the audience being there um it's also probably really important to say and you know particularly in the context of this year as well that that um um and again this is not necessarily something that my own research will will go into but but um in terms of the carbon footprint of a of a of a theatre show um consultants such as Julie's Bicycle and and uh the Green Theatre Report um which came out in 2008 uh Mayor of London uh found that the largest carbon footprint associated with a show is uh the audience and um and uh that of course has a huge implication because we can treat the audience as a passive observer but actually if they are um you know um sort of the the travelling of the audience to the theatre is the largest part then that's uh that's a big aspect but uh I'm I'm aware of the time as well I have the tendency to just carry on there's so much to say I can see that we've already reached one o'clock um and but I think there's there's I can see some other questions so we'll carry on a bit longer and for people who have to leave um we are recording this so you know they're interested they can um it will be available um to to watch so to to not worry if they if they do have to log out but I think we'll just carry on for a bit longer if that's all right with you Hamish just because I want to get to a few more questions um whilst we've still got and people are still staying with us I can see how many people are here so I think we'll just carry on and I'll let our tummies rumble a bit bit more and Danny have you got any raised hands there yes we've got another raised hand from Georgie Cunningham so I'm just going to unmute them now thank you oh can you hear me okay yes you can hear great welcome fantastic um hi Hamish hi Sarah um so I'm here with um with Kate Carey who's also um on the call we're two parts of um Tenderfoot Theatre which is an an eco theatre collective um we're hoping to graduate this summer um and it's been so interesting for us watching this talk because so much of what you've talked about has been so integral to the practice that we're trying to put um kind of on its feet um so thank you so much for for giving us that kind of validation and also giving us so many ideas um to kind of try and and continue our our work of reducing our carbon footprint on that um I'm interested in your views on one particular thing which is the the relationship between script and set as an actual physical um thing and what I mean by that is that one of our um one of our practices that we we want to look into is in order to reduce our paper waste any scripts that we do use because we're all quite holistic actors we all like having that thing in your hand that you can make notes on and you can rip up and you can do a physical cut and paste using any of that paper to actually build elements of the set um and incorporating those two and the relationship between those two and we're just interested in in your views on that yeah yeah it's very interesting and and similar to to the example of the um uh where the the script is projected the script is the set design and um again there are all sorts of ways of doing that and again resonance is if if it's um there are multiple layers in terms of um if it's recycled material and and there are kind of other um themes going on there I mean I I think that um uh practically also there are there are conversations about what happens the following stage once a script is ripped up into pieces has it lost sort of um its ability to be put back together can you have a can you can the script document in itself be be be modular or or you know um be used in different ways um um I I think that um uh again there's that you know there's there's a wealth of of experimentation that can go on there um and um uh you know and it's very dependent on the the specific for me the narrative that's being that's being said and if it resonates if as long as it's not sort of completely contrived but I think it's another little sort of detail that can um add something to the artistry of it and and again I think um again this is more of a practical exam um answer and to some extent is that that's the um um the recycled material can supposedly not have the same production value but I think if this I think that if it's very much part baked into the intention of the whole production itself then then um then it's it's perfect for for that but but um you know that could also be a limitation on some some level but um I I think that sorry I'm just gonna sorry Hamish to interrupt you with your your flow there but just again another question that sort of intersects into this so I'm just you know trying to push in as many things as we can this is from Jess Curtis and she says as a designer I often keep my scripts from my projects as they become an artifact relic memory of the whole experience and people involved with the changes and the final notes and first thoughts and if an electronic document is often recommended as an environmentally responsible choice for a production how might that affect the archaeology of these documents because of course actually in your presentation you you use a lot of kind of archive material and we're drawing from paper archive so it's interesting in this kind of changing ecology of of the analogue and the digital what's happening to the script in in this process so I just wanted to sort of intersect with Jess's thoughts because I thought that connected to what Georgie was asking you there as well. Thank you yes yes you know it's a really it's a really good point and I think that's actually um also um um to answer both questions simultaneously if possible the the um um I think the the script document you know as I sort of said at one point at what point in the in the process does it exist and and um there are always a lot of revisions and sometimes there isn't really a script at all it's just because there's so many individual pieces that are kind of either improvised or or a document is produced that day so sometimes it's it's not a physical thing that exists in its entirety I mean I think that's quite often the case perhaps but but um but considering it as a as an archive document and and again interesting in in terms of Georgie's point about using it in the set design the set design itself could become the archive of of it and and that um obviously there are there are storage implications of that but but but um but it it if if the script was used on a as a physical document it becomes it can it can um suggest information suggest knowledge about that object at a later stage as well so um you know there is a um uh I think that the script is a kind of transient thing um it can find new meaning in uh historical or personal um um interest and and and and again be be juxtaposed if there's a uh a very traditional script um with a with a kind of completely different dramatic dramatic process that's maybe doesn't use the script or uses a different vocabulary how you know if you if you did an experiment to kind of throw those two traditions together what would come out of that and how would uh how would it evolve um but certainly the script is a kind of archival document I think is really important um great thank you yeah and uh for future it's a real question isn't it for future researchers and how we have access to this material as well and yeah Danny are there are there any other raised hands no there's none for now Sarah okay well I'm just going to go to um Julie Young's question and this is probably the the the last question that we've got time for um in this live webinar but I'm sure Hamish would take your questions by email or you know find ways to to connect with him um after the event but Julie wants to ask you um about around the issue of sustainability and the redesign of props for other plays um and if you could just expand um on that idea as well and she also thanks you for your your amazing talk well thank you yes I mean I I think um uh the the the redesign of props or redesign of said elements I mean I in terms of the context of of the script something that um I'm I'm quite interested in is is is uh shifting to work more seasonally rather than um individual performances and uh whether different different performances can have resonances with each other even just very subtly they they they have to be their own individual thing but but I think that there is also an opportunity for for kind of poetry and resonance and uh to go across a season and so um something that I've talked about with a few um set designers previously is to is what would happen if you uh different production teams said for one season we're going to use these same materials we're going to put on very different sorts of performances but we're going to reinterpret them and I I think that there are artists who've done uh processes like that and and absolutely that can't be done for for all theatre but um but there would be there would be lessons that would look there would be learned to come out of that and I think again it would just be an interesting way to question convention and and I think also meaning in in in what we impose linguistically onto uh props and and sets is very important to chair is not just a chair or is a chair just a chair if we sit on it if we stand on it is it a chair anymore I mean um without getting into the um existential realms of that well I feel that's a perfect place to kind of draw to a close as I can just imagine everyone standing on their chairs and questioning convention because surely that is the work of all of us who are engaged in in research out there to kind of keep that in at the forefront of our minds as we we do our work and Hamish thank you so much for a really thought provoking talk I mean we've had um so many questions and I can see in the in the chat box people are really kind of responding to your ideas and I think taking away a lot with them um today so um thank you to you um and thank you to everyone who's attended and helped us have such um a rich discussion and response to Hamish's talk and um we invite you back um we have another research lunch on January the 22nd um about photography and the Caribbean so um we hope that you'll come back and join us for that and have a look at the range of other talks and events we've got running um through this spring term and um we hope that you'll share the recording of this webinar with other people that you know who are interested but couldn't be with us today and I want to thank the PMC team and particularly Danny and our events assistant and LLR events manager for running this event um so smoothly but I hope you'll all join with me in doing a virtual very big round of applause to Hamish and thank him for providing us with so much food for thought on a Friday lunchtime so thanks ever so much Hamish thank you my pleasure and thank you to everybody at the Paul Mellon for facilitating this today it was it was really enjoyable but and you know theatre is about audience and uh you know but don't worry about standing ovations um I'll just assume that's happening great but um but thank you so much um and and please do get in touch if if you wish to follow up I'm sure that there are means to to do that through through this event today