Interview with Emma Gersch

Interview with Emma Gersch Emma Gersch is the Artistic Director of Moving Stories. Moving Stories creates inclusive and accessible theatre that engages and inspires its audiences. They have made large scale Shakespearean productions for the Minack Theatre, staged new writing across Europe and the UK, and created site specific events in bedrooms, offices, and castles. Moving Stories is also the home of Band of Mothers, a group of artists who harness the creative power of motherhood and allow it to inform their creative work. In this video, Emma discusses her extensive experience of directing plays for performance in open-air contexts. Emma, could you tell us a bit more about where Moving Stories came from and what you do now? The name was born out of a project called ‘Moving Stories’ that we did back in 2009. I say ‘we’ because the company was founded by myself and my partner Kitty Randall - she kind of co-founded the company with me. And funnily enough I was on my way to what was then the Southwark Playhouse - it's now moved to a bigger site in Elephant and Castle in London - and at the time it was in London Bridge and we, I had a meeting with the artistic director about the possibility of bringing a particular show that I was working on at the time. It was a Greek tragedy, Orestes, and we were going to be doing it in the in the main space. But as I arrived at London Bridge station - and I'd actually been working in Bath for six years so London was a little bit of an assault to the senses when I first arrived – I remember this journey of arriving at the station and there was a moment that caught my eye where a man in a suit threw his Starbucks cup in the direction of a man picking up litter in the station, one of the station cleaners, and it was such an arresting moment that I actually stopped and couldn't believe what I’d seen and sort of ended up sort of running and picking up this cup and apologetically sort of putting it in the man's bin and ended up having this conversation with this chap who was cleaning the station and he looked at me in a kind of surprised way that I was trying to engage in a conversation - you know, “How long have you worked here?” - and what transpired was that he had lived in London for six months. He'd been expedited from Cuba and I was the first person that had spoken to him in six months - apart from, you know, people he worked with or people telling him what to do or asking if he was collecting litter - and the first person to actually ask him how he was. And I was so shocked and staggered by this, and felt quite overcome, and in the 10 minutes that it took me to leave him and walk to my meeting at the Southwark playhouse I came up with a new proposal all together, which was that I wanted to hear people's stories, and not actors and performative. And I'd become quite interested in performances that were by non-actors at the time. I just was fresh off some amazing training with an Argentinian director called Vivi Tellas who believed in just kind of looking at the natural theatricality around your life rather than necessarily generating it, and she'd done this incredible piece in Buenos Aires called My Mother and My Aunt, which was literally her mother and her aunt in their kitchen cooking and dancing and arguing, and had an audience of 10 around the dining room table participating, and I was really sort of struck by that idea at the time. Anyway, what transpired was a proposal to Southwark to say could we, just could you just give me your space and a bit of faith, and I'd like to do a project in this area where we go and engage people whose stories we might not otherwise hear. And believe it or not, 43 people agreed to speak to us and it culminated in this incredible event where an audience of a hundred - it was a bit of an experiment – arrived at the Southwark Playhouse. We briefed them – I trained up a group of story guides that had been working with all these people around the city, be it the vicar at the cathedral, or the butcher at Borough Market, or a homeless person - and off they split, and they went and listened to people's stories but in situ, so it was almost a sort of site-specific promenade storytelling event, but you would watch your person actually performing their day-to-day tasks. So it would, if it was an ice cream man and he's, you know, he'd be pulling a Mr Whippy as he's telling you the story of fighting in the Falklands War, and so it was just this extraordinary kind of outpouring of truth, and this audience of a hundred, who had arrived in a very frantic - you know, “How long does it last and where's the toilet and what's it about?” - returned an hour later entirely changed by this experience of having listened to stories that they might have just walked past. So the event was called ‘Moving Stories’: this idea that, you know, stories are emotionally moving but you can also move a story on, that you might listen to it. So if you and I had gone to that event together we would be put in two different groups and meet different people, we'd come back, we'd share those stories, and we'd move on and we'd move the story on. So that was the origins of the company and that project sort of stayed at the heart of what we do. So even though we do, you know, proper theatre on stages, we still have the spirit of the kind of ‘Moving Stories’ event. In fact, we're working on something similar in lockdown, where we're gathering stories of mothers in lockdown in a similar way, yeah. You perform your Shakespeare shows at a wide range of open-air locations – are there any kinds of similarities, have you found, at these varied open-air venues? Yes, I mean lots of spirit similarities. It's mainly about audience, and I think an audience behaves entirely differently when there's no roof, because they are alive to the elements, as are the actors, and so we have a heightened and wonderful sense that we're all sharing the same air. So whereas in a theatre you can contrive a blackout and a smoke machine and a projection and you can really manipulate the senses of your audience, you can't do that as much outdoors. So I've worked for the last 14 years at the Minack Theatre, which if you know it is the most incredible landscape - you know, the actors have to fight really hard to compete with being upstaged by basking sharks in the Atlantic Ocean and the most beautiful sunset you could ever imagine and the moon - and so all of these elements are in play and you cannot ignore them, and I think that's the thing in answer to your question that unites all of the outdoor spaces is that you can't ignore the reality of what is going on. So I've been working for the last two years at Shakespeare's Globe and of course it's you know a slightly different environment with, you know, with more sort of an indoor and an outdoor feeling, but one of the things I’ve learned - I'm part of the higher education faculty there - but one of the things that I've learned as I teach students or, you know, visitors that are coming to the Globe is that Shakespeare wrote his plays for the outdoors. He was constantly referencing the elements, the earth, the sky, the moon, the stars, this wooden O, you know, of the ceiling that the audience would be looking at. The wonderful thing about it – and of course Shakespeare does it best for example in the Prologue to Henry V when he's asking his audience, you know, ‘upon your imaginary forces we shall work’ - he's asking his audience to go on an imaginative journey, which is what I think you're doing with all of your outdoor audiences. You're saying, look, we know this isn't the battlefields of France, we know this isn't Elsinore Castle, it's a wooden stage, and it's raining or it's a, you know, it's a heat wave, but you're sort of then in a lovely relationship of playfulness with your audience where there's a knowing nudge and a wink saying that we're all going on this imaginary journey together, let's have fun, and I think an audience love that relationship. I think they like authenticity, and I think that's probably the thing, as I'm talking about it I'm realising, that has drawn me back and back and back to working outdoors. It's quite hard to go back to indoor theatre when you've been working outdoors, I've found. Your recent production of Romeo and Juliet was performed both in the Roman Theatre at St Albans and at the coastal Minack Theatre.

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