Since thier incpetion five years ago, GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN - Artistic Director Hester Chillingworth, Lucy McCormick and Jennifer Pick - have been making playful, politically engaged, unruly performances at the meeting point between theatre and live art. They have launched a research project looking into the implications of works in progress as a process for artists, developed a mentorship scheme supporting new work, curated a platform for emerging artsits and have toured extensively, most notably with their performance Big Hits, coming to the Almeida Festival this summer. There's a rabbit costume, overt sexuality, fake blood, karaoke and Bible references in Big Hits, and this dramaturgy of the sell-out hit presents a sophisticated set of devices that are confidently slippery. We spoke to Chillingworth about this caustic work, the reason it just keeps coming back, and how her own practices weave in and out of GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVANS's work. 

Run-Riot: Your work operates at the meeting point between live art and theatre. It navigates the political in a playful way. Can you tell us a bit about this intersection? What does it mean to you formally, and what kind of performance work are you interested in making?

Hester Chillingworth: Distinctions between different genres of work can be fairly arbitrary – we don’t see the meeting point of live art and theatre as a concrete place at all. Using that sort of language is for us a way to think about spaces of inbetweenness, where what you’re seeing on stage keeps moving and slipping from one thing to another, to another, to another, to another. Rather than being beholden to one tradition or one label we prefer to position ourselves in a place (or places) where we can enjoy taking inspiration from a lot  of different performance modes but not subscribe to the idea that that means a certain set of rules have to be in place for a whole show. We’ll pick something up, use it until we feel we’ve squeezed it dry, and then pick something else up. Hopefully the watcher is then engaged on a level beyond content - navigating the form of what they are seeing and continually assessing/adjusting how they should be with it and what their roles and responsibilities are in each of the different shifts.

One thing I can definitely say is that a lot of what is often called live art deals with the limits of the body and its exertion in a given task. This is something we’re super interested in bringing into a theatrical ‘show’ format. We want the act of performing to be non cerebral and non psychological. So we will often try to find ways for performers to sweat, exert and push their bodies to breaking inside our theatre work.

Run Riot: GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN make “broken genre performance”, and believe in performance as dialogue. Can you tell us about the politics of the company and where you see your work as a female trio?

Hester Chillingworth: We don’t talk amongst ourselves a great deal about the fact we’re female. We just make work from the positions we occupy and it so happens they are all female. We’re 3 fairly different women though, and (as is of course true for absolutely everyone) our experiences of what it is to be female in the world are by no means the same. In terms of politics: “broken genre performance” is a made up phrase – it’s one way we’ve tried to carve out a space that doesn’t adhere to a genre label, but doesn’t deny they exist either. It’s also a game: are the genres broken in what we do (broken-genre performance) or are the performances themselves broken (broken genre-performance)? It’s up for grabs and it’s a word game as much as anything. We love the slipperiness of language and meaning and we’re often trying to blur, layer up, re-frame what a certain set of words might mean. That relates to politics for us in as much as any assertion of concrete meaning, law, rule, dynamic, tradition, we would have questions about and take to task. It’s fair to say that we’re interested in activating our audiences and encouraging agency all round, hopefully with a knock on effect to outside the performance space. The more people who think that their specific presence in a room is noticed and counts, the better.

Run Riot: In a lot of the company’s work- particularly Big Hits, which we’ll get to in a bit- you use particular devices to construct meaning onstage, in fact, to critique. From repetition through the action, from irony to association. Can you tell us about the development of this stage language, what you feel it’s reacting towards and building on?

Hester Chillingworth: We like to work inside limitation and try to totally exhaust a small list of ingredients, rather than swim less committedly inside a big pool of ingredients. So our stage language is usually an attempt to do that, to exhaust/drain dry our material. So that there’s nothing left in the end but the present relationship of the performer and the watcher. There’s an obvious reaction against the clean, linear, singular stage language of traditional theatre in what we do – and in what lots of companies do nowadays. However, we are always trying to keep the work moving (in our overall canon as a company but also within the individual pieces), so we’re not happy for the stage language to settle in any one place – there’s a lot of messy broken contemporary theatre around and we’d be no happier if the stage language settled there than we would if it was stuck in a traditional position. So for example, in Big Hits virtuosity is very important – in tandem with the more expected ‘failure’ aesthetic of this sort of work. Our stage language builds on and also reacts away from all the different performance languages we see around us in daily life. Once it puts its roots down in any one of these places, it can be labeled and people can decide that that position has nothing to do with them. We want to make work that nobody can easily say has nothing to do with them. 

Run Riot: You have a strand of research and curation in the company. Most notably you’ve been developing a research project into scratch and work in progress performances. You have published articles as a result, which one can read here. As part of this process, you’ve spoken to artists like The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein, Brian Logan, Mischa Twitchin and Gemma Paintin. Can you tell us about this process, where you are now, and some of the major problems or issues regarding the scratch culture?

Hester Chillingworth: Obviously it’s a complex area (which is why we’re doing the research) so it’s hard to sum up all the thinking and talking in a short answer. But I could definitely say that our feeling is that scratch and work-in-progress events can potentially, if not framed with a clear and strong context for artists and audiences alike, be detrimental to the work. And as for many emerging artists these opportunities are the first port of call for showing work in public, this can be a particularly dangerous prospect for nascent work. There’s developed a conflation between the quite different ideas of a platform and safe space for allowing ideas to fail, and between the quite different roles of curator-host and producer. Knowing exactly why you are taking work to a specific event and what your expectations of that event are, are really key.

Run Riot: As a result of your research project, you started a mentorship scheme in 2013, whose first beneficiary is artist Lucy Hutson. Part of this scheme is an online residency- can you tell us about that?

Hester Chillingworth: We don't have a rehearsal studio of our own so we couldn't offer any physical space for developing the mentee’s practice. (We do offer desk space in our office as part of the scheme, but of course that’s a different thing from having room to rehearse.) So offering an online residency (which is hosted on a page of our own website) is our attempt to create some virtual space dedicated, in this instance, to Lucy Hutson developing her practice. We’ve worked with Lucy to think about ways to engage with this virtual space – ways to ‘be in it’. Of course, a virtual space has no walls and accordingly Lucy has seen it as an opportunity to think about how she and her practice might exist in/journey through the internet. She’s also been thinking about other virtual spaces of representation, like animation. Our hope is that exploring the questions key to the artist in a space which can be live, but does not require its audience to be in the same room as the ‘performance’, can be a process which feeds back into the artist’s non-virtual work. 

Run Riot: One of your earlier pieces, External, was a response to Belgian company Ontroerend Goed’s Internal, that revealed an individual audience member’s darkest secrets, it sort of betrayed the participant spectator. What interested you about responding to that?

Hester Chillingworth: We were most interested in what it as to overtly frame something on stage as a ‘response’. Because of course we’re all responding to pieces we see, things we read, songs we hear, all the time. External looks at authenticity, originality and authorship – a concrete central task such as responding to Internal was a very useful ‘hook’ to hang the games we wanted to play on. It was a way to hollow out the centre of the show and to facilitate us making an active show about vacuity. Also, there was a big trend at the time for one-on-one pieces like Internal and, in response to this, External was our ode to the idea of ‘the Show’ – the end-on space, proscenium arch, curtains and extravaganza, but with the same potential for intimacy and betrayal.

Run Riot: Alongside the company, you also have your own practice. Can you tell us how you balance Artistic Direction with a multidisciplinary practice?

Hester Chillingworth:I’ve only recently started my solo practice, but I knew for a while it would be important for me to do so. We have worked very hard as a 3 for the past 5 years to get GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN up and running in the shape it is, and we spend most of our time working together. However there are the occasional gaps where one of us is away for whatever reason so, for me, getting my solo practice up and running is a way to ensure that I can make in all the ways I want to make, and at all times. It’s intense working in a small company and we’ve all agreed that a freedom all round to do other things too in fact bolsters our commitment to the Van.

Run Riot: Your recent solo work, Sold as Seen appeared in Parlour Showroom’s windows in Bristol, featuring a line of “sale signage” posters that engage with retail jargon and play with meaning. It’s a text-based work with a political twist and a subtle intervention. Can you tell us a bit about this work?

Hester Chillingworth:I realised I was obsessing about the word ‘reduced’ in my head. It’s used so freely and easily on the high street but it’s such an emotive and charged word when used in reference to a person. ‘He was reduced to a shivering mess’. I began to look at sale signage in more detail and tried to spot words which had a similar lightness on the high street and implied weight for humanity. So it was this that inspired the piece, combined with a love I have for text work (that is, an artwork where the image is text) and an interest in making something which could intervene on people’s daily route/commute/shopping trip but could equally well go unnoticed and be taken for part of the genuine surroundings. So to some extent the watcher/viewer/passer-by has to actively engage in the act of looking to see why this poster is different from other sale posters. And there is, perhaps, a reward then for the act of actually looking.

Run Riot: You’ve had a long-term collaboration and mentorship with Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells. How has this aided and inspired your work?

Hester Chillingworth:One of the most helpful things I have gained from knowing and working with Tim is the strengthening of my ability to give and receive critique. I don’t share a huge number of words with Tim in a day-to-day way…most of our conversations are on email, with us often both in different countries. The best way I can describe it is like a silent, ongoing, complex but also light conversation that I feel I’m always having with him (and a few other people). But I think that’s part of it – a good mentor is someone who, even in absence and silence, encourages and inspires you to improve and push your work.

Run Riot: Let’s turn to your major show, Big Hits, returning to the Almeida this year. The show looks at censorship, propriety and violence, and it’s interested in doing so in a particularly unruly way, and by making use of the body onstage. Can you tell us about the show’s journey so far, and how you got to mix these different performance languages together?

Hester Chillingworth:Big Hits was commissioned by Festival Belluard Bollwerk International in Switzerland and opened there in June 2012. We’ve been touring the show since then, both in the UK and in Europe. Its UK premiere was at Soho Theatre in September 2012 so these upcoming performances at The Almeida as part of the Almeida Festival are, for us, a long awaited return of Big Hits to London. We’ll be touring the show into Autumn 2013 as well  - it seems like it’s going to have a long life. We always knew we were really interested to look at stage violence in this show so that was in there from the start. Stage violence is a complicated thing – the actual act of violence being represented is of course a simulation, but the performers enacting it do have to exert and sometimes hit their own bodies to achieve the illusion. So it’s not without it’s own violent content – albeit a controlled and self-orchestrated violence. Censorship and propriety are really interesting to us – we’re fascinated by the way audiences will adjust their collective ‘lines of decency’ within a performance, if they are eased into things. So they will watch and even enjoy something they would have said no to at the start of the show, because they accept the route by which the show has arrived there. Testing and playing with the elasticity of these boundaries, and the role humour has to play in their manipulation, is key to us in Big Hits. Unruliness is always in the room for us when we’re making a show. We’re always trying to create spaces for the performers to undertake a certain set of tasks in – but in the knowledge that it’s the opportunities they take to do what they ‘shouldn’t’ be doing that we’re most interested in.

Run Riot: You are a company based in London and Essex but have worked extensively in continental Europe. How has that fed into the creation of Big Hits? What was it that you were really keen to import here?

Hester Chillingworth:The artist support that we have experienced and continue to experience in continental Europe is completely fantastic and puts the UK somewhat to shame. It’s really that dedicated space to make work in, on proper pay, in good accommodation, surrounded by people who want to have conversations about the work and want to push their own contexts/preconceptions that has fed most meaningfully into our practice. Without various European residencies we would have struggled with the resources to make Big Hits, not to mention the Festival BBI co-production, together with co-productions from PACT Zollverein (Germany) and Bora Bora (Denmark). We should give a shout out the Colchester Arts Centre too, who came on board as a UK co-producer. This level and model of artist support is what we want to import to the UK and we hope eventually to grow our mentorship scheme in that direction.

Run Riot: Mark Ravenhill mentioned your show as being “funny, sexy, frightening, essential”. What do you think he meant by that?

Hester Chillingworth:He’s a man of careful word choice, so I’m hoping he meant just what he said. If he feels he can say it’s essential that people should watch Big Hits, that’s brilliant. It was certainly essential to us to make it.

Big Hits 

Almeida Festival

25th-27th July 

http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/bighits