Quirk Theatre considering Utopia by Katie Villa

How we made a show. But nearly didn’t.

Katie Villa, Artistic Director Quirk Theatre

A year ago I had nothing to say about the Climate Crisis. Or, more accurately, I was saying nothing about the Climate Crisis. I had plenty I could have said, given a safe enough space and a gentle enough ear. I could have said that I was frightened. More than frightened. Frozen by the horror of it all. Floods, fires, famines, displacement, climate refugees, starving children, starving people, starving polar bears. But a large part of me felt that I, silly old me, had nothing valuable to offer. I was not a scientist. I was not an expert. So I kept my fears and my thoughts and my dreams to myself, hoping beyond hope that the clever people over there would sort it all out.

But a year ago I was also faced with a decision. Could my company, Quirk Theatre, make a Christmas show about Climate Change? I’ve been Artistic Director of Quirk for 10 years. Quirk itself has been going for over 20. For all those years, Quirk has provided a meaningful Christmas alternative to pantomime in Exeter, and later in North Devon too. Myself and my long time collaborator, Simon Hall, have been telling stories with a social conscience, deeply aware of the privilege that having an annual stage and an avid Christmas show audience affords us. We tell our silly, magical, hopeful stories year on year, often to children having their very first experience of live theatre, always trying to push the boundaries of what a Christmas show can be. We’ve explored the Refugee Crisis with a family of displaced aliens, Brexit through an island of Puffins, and rural racism woven into a story of fossils, friendship and ancient Indian tales.

So why not the Climate Crisis?

Honestly? It just didn’t feel like us. It didn’t feel Quirk. And it sure as heck didn’t feel festive. When we started to explore, as a team, our resistance to it, we realised we all had the same kind of show in our heads. We were imagining something preachy and dull. Something that told audiences they should be doing more, but left them with no idea how to begin. We didn’t want to make that show.

Quirk Theatre performers

So we set out to make the kind of show we wanted to see. If the climate crisis needs all our voices (and I believe passionately that it does) then we needed to try. If we were feeling unrepresented in the climate story of now, oscillating wildly between naive hope and abject pessimism, then it was likely our audiences were too. We began, as we often do, by imagining, through howls of laughter, the worst version of a climate show that we could possibly think of. (Heartily recommend this exercise as a brilliant shifter of creative block by the way). And once we had imagined the worst, we could start tip toeing towards the opposite.

Dayzee & the World of Tomorrow was the result. We set it in a conditionally optimistic future, feeling from the very first writing days that the future gave us space to play without getting bogged down in the ‘whataboutism’ of now. Of course the science can show us where we are likely headed, but the future is not yet written and we felt both excited and utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of conjuring a vision of what might lie ahead. We knew we wanted it to be bold. To present a vision of the future, rather than the vision of the future, so that audiences could be inspired to dream up their own.

Our process was one of deep and joyful co-creation and through a series of workshops we began to build this brilliant future with primary school children across Devon. And whilst every child’s contribution was unique, there were some undeniable themes! For the kids, it was all flying cars and hoverboards, computer chips in the brain, virtual school teachers and no more homework. But we were also co-creating with climate scientists, weather experts and Sustainability thought leaders and their visions of the future were much more community oriented. We explored wellbeing economies and sharing networks, grassroots governance and hyper local food supplies. Which led to the problem of how we honoured both in the show, in the writing but also in the stage design (a challenge our wonderful Designer Fi Russell rose to and then some!). After all, as Transition Towns founder and Imagination Activist Rob Hopkins says, we need a future that we want to run towards.

Quirk Theatre performer

Early in the project we talked to Rob and he shared a story about the deep impact a photo of the Fridays for Future climate marches had had on his practice. He had seen young people wearing t shirts emblazoned with “I’ve been to the future. We won”. Which led to the development of his ground breaking Field Recordings from the Future project. And his story had a profound effect on our project too, and we started thinking about what kind of experience in the future would send you home with that T shirt. In the end we couldn’t justify the Time travel tourists from our show returning with mass produced merch in this way, but the question fuelled our many months of writing. What does a future look like, where we have won?

So we took the audience, and our main character, Khaled, to a future. There were hybrid animal puppets and Ant Lions, insect burgers and talking trees, a Dabke dance, hoverboard and a swap shop that can read your mind. Importantly, we didn’t try to answer everything. I mean we did try, to start with. But we quickly realised that if we tried to answer every single question in this imagined future, that we would never get anywhere. We would be stuck firmly in the whataboutism that freezes so many conversations now. There were some things we just couldn’t tackle and that had to be OK. We put our focus on things that felt exciting and fizzy, served our madcap adventure story and gently laid other, less relevant things aside. After all, the gaps were where the magic was hiding, inviting our audiences to ponder how they, uniquely, might fill them.

At the beginning of the project, we were wrestling with the kind of future we were presenting. A dystopia felt too hopeless (and too ubiquitous). A utopia, too naive, too perfect. We found our happy home within the forgiving concept of ‘Thrutopia’- a future that is actively on it’s way to somewhere better. One where there is still much to do and mistakes are still made but hope is abundant. During the hoverboard scene, Dayzee and Khaled are sitting high above the clouds looking down on the green fields below and chatting about their own worlds, 75 years apart. Dayzee says “we have to imagine the futures we want into being” and that line truly captures for me what we were trying to do with this show. You can never truly know what an audience makes of the art you usher into the world, but I keep coming back to one bit of audience feedback which reads: “Dayzee shows us the future- and it’s beautiful”. Perhaps we did conjure a future that people might want to run towards.

The climate crisis needs all our voices. Imperfect. Half formed. Uncertain. Sometimes we will get things wrong. Sometimes we will make mistakes. But really, the only mistake is to not share our unique voice with the world.

Because you never know who might need to hear exactly what you have to say.

Katie Villa - Artistic Director, Quirk Theatre