Improbable are moving…

But to where? Maybe you can help us to find out.

This is an invitation to work with us on the next big Improbable project, which is taking an unprecedented form. This is surprising for a company that has explored so many diverse forms to date: we’ve done plays, operas, puppetry, panto, musicals, big outdoor spectacles, small indoor Impros. What else is left? Here’s one thing the company has never yet done: created a home.

We’ve had small offices. Plenty of those. But to do the creative work we have always rented, begged, borrowed, been asked into, other peoples’ spaces. And now, after twenty-five years, we want a space of our own.

Not a venue. Not a ticketed theatre. An Improbable space. A playful one. A porous one. One that can welcome and hold all the roles - those with tickets and those without. A place to share the work, make the work, or take a break from the work and just hang out.

Why?

Some of us are getting old. Older. Pushing fifty, sixty. The dream of a home is the dream of a place to house the practice, so that we can both deepen it and pass it on. If Improbable were on a hero’s journey, now would be the time for us to bring the gift back home - but we need a home to bring it home to.

During the pandemic the only space we had, the office space, had to go online. We have done a huge amount of work like this - remotely- and now, as things start to re-open, if we are to move back into a real, embodied space, we want it to be a creative one. The pandemic has also made us less London-centric, so we could go, almost, anywhere. But we want to be somewhere that we want to be, and somewhere that wants to have us. Somewhere other people would want to come. So, we are thinking landscape - not inside a city but near enough to one to be within reach.

But where?

We do not know, but we are quite good at not knowing. If there is one thing that we have been practicing these last twenty-five years, it’s that - the art of not knowing.

One thing we do, when we do not know what to do is this - we invite in all the voices, the professional, the personal, the irreverent and the seemingly irrelevant, the incidental, the marginalised, the dead and gone, the ghosts. And then we listen to them. This is how we make our shows. Put the voices and all the things they have to say, all the images they bring with them, into the middle of the room, making a strange, haphazard collection of stuff, a great pile of straw, and then we see what we can create from them, what gold we can spin from them, or - better still - we wait and see what wants to be spun. This time what we are hoping to spin is a home.

And this is where you come in.
Because for this project, yours is one of the voices we want to invite in....

Much of Improbable’s work to date has centred around building community, whether that is the temporary community of a show - a group of performers - or the whole artistic community that comes together at our Devoted and Disgruntled Open Space events. We know we cannot do this new, home-making project alone - it is going to be a big collaboration, our biggest to date. We are not like Jack - we cannot just go and build ourselves a house. We are going to need the help of builders, farmers, estate agents, architects, entrepreneurs, ecologists, funders, artists, children, animals. Trees too. Stones. And we are going to need help at every stage, including now, at the dreaming, wondering, questioning stage.

We are on a treasure hunt. We are on the look out for clues, like strands of straw, and they could come from anywhere. At the moment, Phelim’s and Matilda’s son, Riddley, is doing a project at school to build a model of a shelter, some form of dwelling. Phelim and Matilda went with him to the Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex at the weekend and saw some old buildings- thatched roofs, wattle and daubed walls, as well as a beautiful gridshell construction, like an upturned ark - that felt like a clue.

On the way back, driving in the car, they slowed down, seeing something in the road - it was an owl, perched on the ground, staring, having just killed a rabbit. It flew away with the rabbit in its claws. That felt like another clue.

We don't know what any of these clues mean. We do not need to know that yet. As with a show, at present we are simply searching, gathering. We’ve been having conversations with other artists, other home-owners, inviting in different voices, collecting clues. This, now, is us widening the conversation further, to include you, whoever you are reading this, however you have or haven’t engaged with Improbable till now. Because you might have a clue. It could be a place you know which you love that you want to tell us about. It could be a memory you have from a show we once did. It could be a dream. It could be a photo. It could be a book. It could be you - you could be a clue.

Imagine we are all sitting in a circle, a growing circle, like at an Open Space event, like every show we have ever made has started. If you have any clues, any strands of straw you wish to add to the pile in the middle please do - post below and tell us, or get in touch - email office@improbable.co.uk. We need all the straw we can get - we have a big dream, a whole home to build.

Phelim, Lee, Matilda
July 2021

The Gathering

Gathering…