Can You Keep a Secret?

Photo credit: Joe Leary

Shush. We want to tell you a secret. 

Ready?

We might have found Improbable a home. Either a home, or a highly significant clue, a momentous step towards one. 

 But before we say any more, to build suspense, we need to do a quick recap. This is both for the benefit of those who are only joining the story now, and for the rest of us as well, since at such a key transition in our Improbable lives, it feels important to go back to how we began – to tell of our origins.

Here we go.

Once upon a time there were some young theatre-makers who stumbled upon a secret. They didn’t mean to find it. In fact, it was something they could only have discovered by accident. 

 It was this: 

 Within the shows they put on, the best moments, the ones that felt most alive, most true, were those when something went wrong – moments they had never rehearsed and had not planned. They were alchemical moments, moments to die for, moments worth living for, when everyone in the room, audience and actors alike, felt like they were part of something special – like they were sharing a secret. 

And the young theatre-makers realised they wanted to create shows made up of moments like this. 

Their discovery felt like a secret not because they wanted to keep it to themselves but because it wasn’t the way most people thought things worked, and so it felt radical and precious. They knew, therefore, that they needed to look after it. But how? How to protect a thing you didn’t plan and can’t control? How to keep the quality of a happy mishap, on purpose?        

Whilst pondering this conundrum, they were asked if they wanted to run a theatre. It was tempting but it didn’t seem the right next step, because although they weren’t sure how best to look after their secret, they already knew some things that could spoil it: demanding great results; strict rehearsal schedules; making decisions well in advance; working industriously hard– things they were worried they would have to do if they ran a building.  

Instead, what they wanted was something light and flexible. Something that could take many different shapes and do many different things. So, they made a company. An Improbable one. They hoped it would be a good container for their secret.   

And it was. 

Over the next twenty odd years, the theatre-makers performed, taught, and studied the secret, and although they shared it far and wide, it still felt like something about which not many people knew. It still felt secret. In the process they discovered there was quite an art to secret-keeping. Here’s some of what they found helpful in that art:

To be patient.

To listen.

And then listen some more.

To tell the truth.

To invite: to send out invitations to people, images, possibilities, and not mind whether or not they turned up (because it isn’t a real invitation if you insist that someone comes).

To be prepared to let go of their best ideas.

To be happy about not knowing what was going to happen next, until long after they were meant to know.

To be willing for it not to work.

To be willing to do these things over, and over, again. 

Whilst learning these skills, they made some pretty good shows. Somehow the art of secret-keeping leant itself well to working with ordinary, everyday objects and materials – bits of newspaper, sticks, Sellotape – so their shows had lots of everyday stuff in them, used in surprising ways. The shows were good enough that, gradually, they got invited to perform on bigger and bigger stages.

 But this was risky.

 It’s one thing to look after a secret like theirs in some grubby little room above a pub, doing an impro gig, it’s quite a different thing to look after it at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York or on the stage of the ENO in London. Or is it? Is it really that different? Because, at the end of the day, the secret was the same. It needed the same care, wherever they took it – into a studio, a play, a musical, an opera, a workshop, a conference, onto a tiny stage or a vast arena.

By this time the theatre-makers were not so young anymore, not quite so fleet of foot, and the idea of a building began to come back to them. Not a venue so much as a home for the secret – a place to keep on keeping it, sharing it, learning from it, because it seemed to them, if anything, over the years, to have become even more precious, even rarer and more important, not just for making good theatre, but for making a good life and a better world.  

 At first, they thought that to get a building they would have to form a plan, make lots of important decisions well in advance and work industriously hard, but the years went by, they carried on making shows and no building came into being. And then it struck them – of course! – to find a home for the secret, they needed to do the things they had learnt to do whilst keeping it: they needed to listen, not to know, be patient, let go of their ideas, send out invitations….So they did, and lo and behold, after that, things began to happen rather fast……

***

That’s the end of our back story. If you have not read it, here is the original invitation we sent out in our treasure hunt for a home, last summer.

 We have received an amazing response to that initial invite over the last seven months, and we are enormously grateful to everyone who has contacted us. It has been heartening and inspiring to feel how our quest for a home is in fact a part of a much wider movement to create and find sanctuary, belonging, connection, during these turbulent times. 

 We used the metaphor of a treasure hunt, and it has felt like one – we followed some of the clues down south to the sea, up north to Morecambe. We met an owl, we found a mouse. And then one day we received a suggestion, sent by a writer, Nicky Singer, about somewhere that was, she said, where she felt most creative on earth. Worth checking out, we thought. And it turned out that – as happens in so many stories - after searching the land, the treasure was right beneath our feet…..

Because this place that Nicky had suggested was only half an hour’s drive from where several of us happen to be based, right now. That was the first clue. 

We paid a visit. It was a farm, but also a great deal more than a farm. A site which was many different things at different times, to different people. An organic dairy farm. A market garden. A glamping site. A classroom - the indoor kind and the outdoor kind. A cheese-making business. A wood and willow workshop. And many other things besides. Years ago (about the same time Improbable began) it had also been the site of the Performing Arts Labs, which Nicky helped to lead. Welfare State had done a show there. John Hodge, Danny Boyle’s script writer, had dreamed up an idea for a film there. 

We walked around the land. We walked past a crop of withies. The same stuff from which our puppets in our opera Satyagraha are made - the puppets that right then and there were in the middle of being brought back onto the stage at the ENO. That was the second clue. 

And we were shown some buildings. An old brick works. A barn. An oast house. Buildings which, when taken altogether, were about the size of BAC’s Grand Hall. Buildings for which there isn’t, currently, any definite plan.  

It seemed exciting. And so we had a meeting with some of the people from there about exploring the idea of an Improbable home on their land.

The thing about this place, they said, is that it’s something of a well-kept secret. 

That was the third clue.

So – thanks for waiting - here’s the secret: 

It’s called Bore Place. It’s the home of the Commonwork Trust, a non-profit organisation focused on regenerative agriculture and supporting people to live happy, fulfilling and sustainable lives through connecting with nature and each other. We are in the process of agreeing to enter a period of R&D with them, to see if/ what kind of collaboration might emerge between us. 

The nub of it is this:

How do we transform, grow and keep the secret? Historically, the company has been small, itinerant and flexible, so for us to make a home will be an even greater challenge than putting on an opera at the Met. To build a creation centre and look after the land on which it stands, the people who work there, the people who come there. How do we look after the secrets, well, while we do all this? 

And behind this is a question that goes far beyond our Improbable story: 
How to grow bigger, and yet not destroy the precious things which made the growth possible in the first place? Because, to date, we - as in the human race - haven’t solved this one. We have done a tremendous amount of scaling up, and it has incurred a tragic amount of loss – lives, lands and secrets, gone. 

In light of this, it feels important for Improbable to explore our challenge of scaling up in collaboration with an organisation that has sustainability at its heart, and that describes itself as a well-kept secret. 

We will, of course, do what we do during this period of research - we will apply our secret skills to our unfolding conversation with Bore Place: we will invite, we will wait, we will listen. We will not know, listen some more, tell the truth, and be prepared for it not to go as we expect.

And we will see what emerges. It may, or may not, be a building, a home. 

 We’ll keep you posted. 

 And in the meantime, please keep in touch. Tell us your secrets. And along the way, we will need to ask for your support, to see if you can help us keep this secret, well.

Phelim, Lee and Matilda