The Gathering: The Elephant in the Room

Image: “Elephant” by Riddley McDermott

There is a question we have been skirting around for a while now. A year in fact. Because it was a year ago that we initiated an open conversation about our quest for a home. A year since we gave it a name, as we would a show: The Gathering. We started out with ‘where?’ as our main question. We asked you to send in clues, strands of symbolic straw, to help us. We made a short film, a record of our thinking and dreaming in that moment, in which we even named a date- we said we would have found a place by August 11th 2022. In other words, as I write this, by today. 

And, astonishingly, we have found a place. Bore Place. 

Since answering the ‘where,’ more recently, we have turned our attention to the question of ‘what,’ as in what we might do there. I wrote about the idea of creating an arts-led learning community, of holding space for difference. Huge thanks to all those who attended our recent Open Space on this (despite train strikes and other challenges), and to everyone who has written to us in response to our latest round of questing and questioning. We have gathered a wealth of straw from these exchanges. And this autumn we will be making a start on the ‘what’, in a tentative but tangible way, as we begin to contribute to Bore Place’s existing education programme, introducing an Improbable element into the mix. 

But there’s another question we haven’t discussed yet - the elephant in the room. Or not the elephant - we love the elephant. We love talking about the marginal, the difficult, the dismissed. We talk about the elephant all day, every day - what we haven’t discussed yet is the room. 

What room? What are we going to build? 

Out of what? Some actual straw? Or sticks? Or bricks? 

Which little pig’s architectural plans should we follow?

Because being wolf-proof isn’t necessarily our aim….

It is deliberate that we have delayed discussion of the room- the big build - for so long. There is a contradiction in terms at the heart of this project, which makes talking about the room difficult for us. Improvisation is our core creative practice: how can we, as an impro company, create a fixed, solid structure to house the spirit of what we do? How can we, having spent our lives following unplanned impulses, set about applying for planning permission? This conundrum has tripped us up for years. We talked about having a creative base a decade ago, but our talk was driven by the idea that we had to have a building to have a home, and this made the dream forever beyond us, like a mirage we could never reach. It was too solid a proposition. It made us think of bricks, of business plans, budgets and fundraising campaigns, and we were too busy making shows to countenance such an undertaking. It was only a year ago, once we let go of the idea of a building and reframed the project as an artistic quest for a home, that things began to change. Then we could happily launch ourselves into an unknown, unfolding process. Then we could begin at once, without bricks or budgets. Then things started to happen. And fast. One year on, we have accrued a great stash of resources and clues; we have an inspiring network of potential collaborators, and we have a wonderful location. What we don’t yet have is a building: the elephant still needs a room. 

One of the many exciting things about Bore Place, is that the room which we might inhabit doesn’t exist yet, but the footprint of it does. Or rather the footprints - you see we hope to have space for more than one elephant. There are actually three potential rooms we could build on site, since there’s…. 

The little footprint of an old oast house. 

The middle-sized footprint of a lean-to pole barn. 

The great big footprint of a large barn - about the same size as BAC’s grand hall.

c/o Bore Place

As I write this, I realise this is satisfying from a story-telling point of view, three being the number of times things have to happen to establish a pattern and then mark a change. Three being the number that can show a progression, that can describe an arc - beginning, middle, end. Three little pigs in three houses. Three bears with three bowls of porridge. Three Improbable spaces. We want our building process to unfold in the same way a story does. And it must for there are, as I said, footprints on the land – the story began a long time ago, as so many stories do - others have already walked this way. We want to follow them, to build, not only on the land, but on the history of the place, to pay attention both to what has gone before and to those who live and work at Bore Place today. We don’t want to do a Goldilocks’ style break and enter, but rather to ask and to invite. We talk about it in the film we made a year ago - I’m going to write out what Phelim said within it, when he was dreaming about our home:

“The making of it needs to involve people… like the feeling that our Open Space events have had….of people being amazed at what they could do together….Can you make a space for people where they feel like that? That it wasn’t done for them. It wasn’t decided what it should be like before they came, and they were told they should use it in a certain way. But it has invented itself and could only have happened if people were involved.”

From our sense of it needing to be a collaborative, emergent process, at present we have three ideas for the three footprints, for how the story of our home might grow from here….. 

We think we will start with the little footprint. A little straw structure. We think maybe the thing to do is to make a room, at first, that can hold a kitchen table, and a porridge pot - to begin with the oast house, with its history of oats. There we can make porridge, eat together, and dream and build, and build and dream, outwards, upwards. The oast house is in between the other two footprints - so we would be starting small but in the centre. I wrote about porridge pots before we even found Bore Place, about how we want to make our home like one of those magic ones that never empties, so an oast house seems like a good place from which to begin. 

The second thing we might make is a temporary structure in the middle-sized pole barn footprint. A house of sticks. Something we could create from the materials to hand on site - the wood and the withies. An Improbable den. Something where the making of it is as much a group process as the workshops we then hold within it. Something deliberately designed to be blown down, re-built, re-invented many times. And we would learn along the way a whole lot of things, which could inform how we approach the creation of a more permanent structure, and how we then fill the last and largest footprint. 

The big footprint. If we are following the pattern of the little pigs, this one should be made of bricks. And, as it happens, there are bricks right next door, in an old brick kiln. But we are dreaming of this one being a great big boat of a space, so we might need other materials besides bricks to make it float. Maybe a bit of everything – a mix of bricks and straw and wood. We have talked about our home as an ark for the arts, with room enough for all manner of creatures to come on board, not only elephants. A wide empty room that can hold a great process, be that of an Open Space, a rehearsal, a ritual, or something else we haven’t even dreamt up yet. 

This time last year Phelim had a vision of being in that big building, and this was several weeks before we found Bore Place. I am going to quote from him, again, in the film:

“I got this flash image. I was in the building, and I was looking up and I could see the circular ceiling - wood - and it was carved, and it said: 

‘If theatre didn’t exist this would be a good place to start’ 

Keith Johnstone. 

….That’s what it should fulfil.”

That’s when we’ll have finished – when, uroboros-like, we have made a space from which we can start again. A new story. We’re growing old, you see, so it’s time to go back to the beginning. 

There we have it, then - our three footprints, three dreams. 

But here’s the nub of it - the paradox we have to hold as we go forwards: it isn’t that impro involves no planning - we make plans all the time, even in our entirely improvised shows. The dreams outlined above are a kind of plan. The skill is in letting the plans go when they don’t pan out as we imagined. So I think we have to proceed like that. Make a plan and be ready to throw it away, or change it, as we go on. And to listen. All the time to keep listening to the stories - of our Bore Place collaborators, of the land, the straw, sticks, bricks, and of our Improbable community -  we want to listen to your stories, whoever you are reading this. 

So, it’s time to ask you the question we’ve been avoiding for a year - the one about the actual straw: what kind of room would you like us to build? Please send us some images of real straw buildings this time, or of other buildings, or rooms that have inspired you. Or tell us about other processes of putting up a den, a hut, a shelter, a house, a barn, a boat. All voices and views are welcome, those of pigs, bears, elephants, even wolves– we need those tricksters too, to huff and puff at our plans, or try and sneak down the chimney- they have important ingredients to bring to the porridge pot too. We want to make room – a room, or two, or three – enough for us all.

c/o Bore Place