Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2021 - 30

Worktable with Wild Bride Notebook, July 2018. | Photograph courtesy of Skye Strauss.

Mitchell's wider artistic practice as it
moves outward from the attic.

Landscape Theatre

On its largest scale, Mitchell's desire for
a dose of reality becomes not just about
small things, but also about whole places.
I was also able to follow Mitchell's work
into the open air where his love of authentic things translates into a sincere
affection for the history and inherent
wonder of a place. In WildWorks landscape theatre performances, the way
the real world and the stage collide is reversed as the real space shapes the way
the fiction unfolds. Instead of finding an
image to ground the fairy tale, the most
beautiful moments in these adaptations
grow out of the landscape. In an interview, Rice explained that, for Mitchell,
the environment was not just inspiring
but absolutely crucial to telling the story:
" You couldn't do that piece without that

environment " (Morris and Rice, 2005).
Just as the mixed-media works in the
attic could be made of nothing else, the
place and the piece become inseparable.
I got to experience a WildWorks performance by attending 100: UnEarth at
The Lost Gardens of Heligan in St. Austell
during my research summer in Cornwall
(2018). It was the last WildWorks performance Mitchell helped to conceptualize before his death. For 100: UnEarth,
WildWorks adapted the myth of Orpheus
and Eurydice into a site-specific performance in the sprawling gardens (see
images on page 28). The performance
began in an open field at dusk. The grass
was high and golden, and the many-colored green hills rolled away over farm
land and homestead to break themselves
against the rocky Cornish coast. In a
threshed performance space in the dry
grass, flattened by many feet and ringed
in hay bales that provided rudimentary

30 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | WINTER 2021

seating to audience members, a group of
women in long skirts were setting a harvest table. When Orpheus returned from
the war, the men in olive-green uniforms
seemed to rise-up out of the patchwork of
the landscape.
The middle of the promenade performance gave the audience time to explore
a warren of interconnected gardens. In
a maze of roses, the swallows swooping overhead mirrored children running
back and forth carrying letters, folded
like paper planes, to forlorn brides
wandering in the labyrinth. Behind a
different wall, men in army uniforms
marched into the distance with shovels
thrown over their shoulders where their
rifles should be. A voiceover named
those who tilled the soil in the gardens
before they left to serve and never returned. A series of cots set up on a plot
of grass held wounded men, their heads
a hallucinogenic riot of flowers. Each
space was activated according to the
story, but the staging also drew the eye
toward the pre-existing features of the
space: bird houses on high walls, brick
archways, and grassy knolls. Much like
standing in the middle of the attic, there
was no wrong or uninteresting place to
look, you were always simultaneously
immersed in the story and in the beauty
of the gardens themselves.
The same sense of fact-meeting-fiction found in The Wild Bride also pervaded 100: UnEarth, encouraging me to
use my own thoughts and associations
to make sense of the abstract images
before me and connect them back to the
story. Catching up with the protagonist
in the next section, the audience walked
along a fenced path where luggage tags
allowed them to literally add their memories to those already inscribed on the
site. As Lyn Gardner said of the earlier
production Souterrain, " This is theatre
to which you must bring your own grief
and sense of loss " in order to personalize the story (2006). If you were dipped
in the river Lethe, like Eurydice, what
memory would you cling to? What
would you long to forget? My tag gave
me a physical place where I could follow the impulse to insert myself, and my
story, into the staged story that was unfolding all around me. The installation
made space for the audience to become
the final piece of the collage, so they too
become a part of the performance for

Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2021

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