A Tree for the Barbican

Posted on by Paul Burgess

This project was an absolute joy.

I was invited to create a tree from children’s imagination as part of Our Street, a project by the Barbican Centre’s Communities and Neighbourhoods team. They had an opportunity between Very Serious Arts Exhibitions to transform the prestigious Curve gallery space into an ‘anti-exhibition’ for local families over the summer holiday. This would be a space where kids can play and make stuff without being told to be quiet, respectful, and not touch anything. But it would also be created by artists channelling all their skill, experience, and creativity into making a space for childish imagination and playfulness to be let loose.

A class from St Luke’s Primary, just up the road, had been brought on board as consultant for the project, so I joined a creative session led by members of the Barbican team at the school, and got the kids drawing the most weird and wonderful trees they could conjure up. I then adapted, working with sustainable set builders Footprint Scenery and the Barbican to come up with something practical as well as dramatic and celebratory.

The other major partner in this was Eletric Pedals, run by Colin Tonks. Electric Pedals creates a range of amazing pedal-power things, including outdoor discos for school playgrounds powered entirely by the kids. Part of my brief was working with them to create special effects for the tree. After trying a few things out, Colin, who, let’s face it, is a bit of a genius, came up with thunder, lightning and some individually selectable park sounds, all powered by two bikes and a hand crank.

Here’s some pics from the process.

Continue reading A Tree for the Barbican

A climate triptych (and some thoughts on painting)

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I take painting pretty seriously. It hugely informs my theatre design work, and I’ve frequently created video material from it. The work I did for the Dulwich Picture Gallery commission was a kind of digitally animated painting (involving a lot of very real painting on a wall). I’ve done several painting commissions. My first pocket money job was scenic painting at Harlow Playhouse.

Allow me a brief tangent, as I’ve just noticed a nice parallel. The pocket money job at Harlow Playhouse came about because I did work experience there aged 14. They must have liked what I did because occasionally, over the next few years, they got me in after school if they were short-handed on a paint call. My first properly paid work in theatre was, rather similarly, after doing a work placement. This was at Shakespeare’s Globe. They kept me on as an assistant in the wardrobe, where I worked on several ‘original practice’ techniques, including painstaking work slashing patterns in silk. I also helped source calico, silk, leather, pewter buttons and other period-appropriate items, and got an excellent working knowledge of London as a result. It was a really fantastic job, to be honest, and it led me eventually to design the sets for a full-scale Globe show.

Continue reading A climate triptych (and some thoughts on painting)

Plot 17 x Hello Stranger

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Every four years The Society of British Theatre Designers celebrates UK theatre design with a combination of books, exhibitions and events. This also feeds into the UK display at the Prague Quadrennial.

Last time round, we had an exhibition at the V&A, which included my design for Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis. This time round, it’s a three-part publication series including a catalogue representing the breadth and diversity of UK theatre design, and a programme of regional events and exhibitions.

My entry this time round is the set – a converted horsebox, in fact – that I designed for Plot17. One of my favourite projects, it’s a mobile hip-hop block party for ages 7+, travelling the world raising awareness, inspiring action and spreading the message of “making things green”. The lead artist on the project, Kenny Baraka, is himself a force of nature, producing amazing lyrics and inspiring the youth up and down the land. It’s a great show, made a brilliant team, but it’s also a doing something really important by making the business of caring about nature and the environment accessible and cool for thousands of kids. And it’s out touring again this year.

Continue reading Plot 17 x Hello Stranger

David Hockney helped me with my schoolwork

Posted on by Paul Burgess

The 1985 Hockney Paints the Stage exhibition at the Hayward Gallery made a huge impression on me as a child. When I came to choosing a topic for my ‘A’ Level art project, and I saw that Hockney was designing a new production for the Royal Opera House, I knew what I had to do.

The new production was Richard Strauss’s Die Frau Ohne Schatten, directed by John Cox, with whom Hockney had already worked on several operas including the celebrated Rake’s Progress, a harmony of music and scenography that makes it one of the most perfect operatic designs I’ve seen. 

I wrote to the Opera House and Susan Usher, head of production, very generously invited me to watch a design meeting. At the end of that meeting I was told I could come to a further meeting attended by Hockney. A few days later I was in the production office at Covent Garden, a few feet away from one of titans of my teenage world, with his blue and red hearing aids and a personal supply of camomile tea bags. By this stage there was a close-to-final model but it wasn’t Hockney’s own. He’d made one at 1:8 scale. The ROH had then made the rather more accurate 1:25 version we were now looking at. At one point it became apparent that he had to remake the Emperors’ throne. ‘I can’t work this size – too niggly for me!’ he declared. He ended up making it at 1:8 when he got back to LA, and sending it over to be scaled down.

Continue reading David Hockney helped me with my schoolwork

Dysbiosis in development

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I was incredibly pleased with how this went. I had the idea just before Covid but then decided to step up and focus on promoting environmentally sustainable design in the theatre sector. Between the Society of British Theatre Designers working group, Ecostage and everything else, this has rather taken over my life! However, the reason I stick with a career in this precarious and often badly-paid sector – and the reason I want it to be sustainable in all senses of the word – is the creativity. Dysbiosis sits right on the overlap between ecology and art. Thanks to Queens generously giving us space, we did a week of experimentation with some really wonderful creative practitioners. Such a privilege!

Here’s a summary from the Daedalus website:

Dysbiosis R&D at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch

A call for collaborators

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Queens Theatre Hornchurch, where I’m on the Environmental Responsibility Subcommittee, is committed to the idea that its journey towards environmental sustainability should be reflected in its creative output. As part of this, David Shearing led This Story is True for Most of Us as part last summer’s the Blueprint Festival. I was a creative associate on the project, which took a vegan meal on the theatre’s roof as a basis for an exploration of time, locality, ecology and – of course – our relationship with food.

Now QTH has given me space to start developing a new piece of theatre. I don’t know what the end result will be, except that it will be open, accessible and connected to the community. But I do know where we’re starting; by looking at our relationship with Nature through the lenses of language, culture and queer ecology. This is how I like to work, starting with research and, by applying my design process to the directing process, working collaboratively to find a logic and a shape to the piece.

Continue reading A call for collaborators

Ecological Values

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Given some of the awkward conversations I’ve had over the course of my career, I’ve added something to my website about my values, my expectations, and what I bring to the proverbial table. It’s very much a work-in-progress which I’ll doubtless keep refining. Do please feel free to let me know your thoughts!

Ecological Values

Lockdown update

Posted on by Paul Burgess

(Top photo: Kenny Baraka with DJ Conrad Kira in Plot 17. Photo: Suzi Corker)

I was asked to summarise, briefly, what I got up to during lockdown. But I couldn’t. It was too varied, and lots of things required some explanation. I guess everyone knows that the theatre sector has been hit very hard by the pandemic. Many workers have left to get sensible, less precarious, less stressful jobs. I haven’t. But I have, as they say, diversified. Perhaps, I thought to myself, that’s worth a blogpost. So here goes.

Myself, Andrea Carr and Mona Kastell at the Ecostage Launch, CCA Glasgow, during COP26. (Photo: Kanatip Soonthornrak)

To start with, I used the opportunity afforded by the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme to help set up the Society of British Theatre Designers’s first working group on sustainability, taking on the role of co-ordinator. I also become one of the directors of Ecostage, an initiative for supporting ecological thinking in the performing arts. Along with Andrea Carr, Mona Kastell, Ruth Stringer and some volunteers, I helped rebuild the project from the ground up as a go-to platform for green-minded performing arts professionals. The new website, ecostage.online, was launched at COP26 last month. Various other advisory roles then followed, including helping gather material for The Green Book, joining the advisory panel on sustainability for the Queens Theatre Hornchurch and informally helping co-ordinate knowledge-sharing with other sustainable performing arts groups around the world. 

In the past I’ve joked that, because of the huge disconnect between workload and pay in the sector, my ideal working model would be to get some kind of stipend, then offer my services for free as I see fit. SEISS felt a bit like that, and for a while I was almost a full-time volunteer.

Continue reading Lockdown update

Latest blogpost for the SBTD: The Green Book

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I’ve been on the committee of the Society of British Theatre Designers (SBTD) for quite a few years now, and just before the pandemic I was one of a small team of designers that, as a result of a roundtable we organised at the V&A during our Staging Places exhibition, set up a new working group for the SBTD to focus on sustainability. Now called the Sustainable Design Group (SDG), it has nearly 60 members and regular four-weekly meetings, with various subgroups (materials, costume, training etc.).

Through the SDG, I also got involved with Ecostage and am now part of core team re-imagining the Ecostage principles and pledge, along with creating a new website. I’ll be sure to tell you a lot more about all this once the website has launched.

Being part of these two projects has led to me being stupidly busy while many of my theatre colleagues were getting into baking and houseplants, and I do feel as though maybe I should have taken more of a chance to breath. But it has also been deeply rewarding and has led to all sorts of interesting connections in the UK and internationally.

One particularly interesting thing over the last few months has been contributing to the creation of The Green Book. This is a project to create an authoritative guide to sustainable theatre for the UK sector. Part One is out in beta form for you to download and trial. Led by the theatre architect Paddy Dillon, working with Buro Happold, it was initiated by the Theatres Trust and the ABTT. I’ve written about it in more detail in my latest post for the SBTD.

The cover image for the SBTD blogpost, which is in the background of the cover image for this post, is from a project by SDG member and amazing designer Alison Neighbour: the original image with an explanation and full credits can be found in the post itself.

If you do have feedback on Part One, I’ve offered to compile any feedback that comes in through the SDG, so feel free to contact me and I’ll add it to our group’s feedback document, which I’ll pass on to Paddy and his team.

Meanwhile there’s lots of other stuff in the pipeline from the various things I’m involved with, ranging from the Ecostage website launch to new design-focused carbon literacy training. Plus some actual design work is creeping hesitantly back… Fingers crossed for that.

In the meantime, if you work in theatre, please have a read of my SBTD blogpost, then download The Green Book and give it a test run.

Love and Information

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I’ve just done a great project with Pegasus Young Company: a production of Carol Churchill’s Love and Information, directed by Corinne Micallef. The cast members were a great ensemble, highly supportive of each other, and really engaged with the piece at a conceptual level. It was really collaborative and we had some great discussions about how the design should work dramaturgically, as well as working through stuff practically, including with the modelbox.

I pulled together a bunch of images from my process for the marketing team to use, including a video of my sketchbook. And I thought I would share them here. Continue reading Love and Information