Image:

Ahead of bringing their new show What Do You See? to the London International Mime Festival in January 2022, Kane Husbands and Sam Hardie of The PappyShow talk to Rosemary Waugh about making theatre that’s filled with joy and silliness, but also asks the audience to radically reassess their own assumptions.

Rosemary Waugh: Let’s start by talking about What Do You See?, the show you’re debuting at at the London International Mime Festival 2022. What can you tell me about the work and how it came into being?

Kane Husbands: Well, it’s a brand new piece that we haven’t yet made, so we’re going into rehearsals in December. Our starting point was thinking about difference, and all the ways that we’re different, and whose identities are celebrated and whose identities are not necessarily given space or a platform. We then started to think about the different ways we see the world. We were wondering how we could try to make an audience take some accountability for their experiences. As a company, we’ve been doing a lot of training on things like unconscious bias and we go into other companies and talk about it, so the show has partly developed from the years of doing that. There will be 12 bodies on stage from very different backgrounds, genders, ethnicities and sexualities, representing all of the different ways of being different.

Sam Hardie: The show has been on a huge journey up until now. Back in January 2021, we commissioned eight artists for what we called ‘the experiments'. And we had these brilliant companies create a series of short films that are now on our website. The amazing thing about this project is really there’s around a hundred artists and a huge wealth of voices that have already worked on the production. So at Shoreditch Town Hall, you’ll see 12 people on stage but actually there’s a whole load of voices and people behind the production.

RW: Has working on it so far made you see anything specific in a really different light?

KH: We’ve been working with Saida Ahmed, a disabled woman. I hadn’t seen life through her experience until working with her. At times, the barriers she can face just to get into the room are unbelievable. She’ll be the first one in the room every day and at the end of the day we’ll be waiting two hours for her taxi to arrive; we’ll be looking for the toilets which are on the fourth floor instead of the sixth floor so a break takes half an hour instead of ten minutes… and it’s like: jeez the way our society excludes you is crazy. There are such little things you could do to include people but actually the norms make that so difficult. When we made this piece we were like, ‘How can we not have Saida in it?’ She’s got to be in and she’s got to be centre stage because society tells her she is on the edge. In this show, we can make a society where we’re showing what equal could be.

SH: I worked on one of the experiments called Portrait of a Voice where we paired four strangers with people they’d never met before. Four of them had to share stories, either visually or spoken or through gifts of food, and then without meeting that person their partner created a portrait of what they thought the person looked like. We had this drum roll – on Zoom! – and then the reveal. And it was like, wow! I’ve been working a mixed race 75-year-old woman and I thought you were… I don’t know! It was so brilliant and exciting. I think we forget how much we paint in our heads from just a voice.

RW: You were last at the LIMF with Boys at the start of 2020, which was a big hit for the company and looked at masculinity. Most recently, the company performed Girls at several venues, the counterbalance to Boys which looked at femininity. How does What Do You See? link to those earlier shows, or do you feel like it’s quite a big departure?

KH: I think our work is still centred around identity and asking what the stories are that we’re not seeing on stage, and who should be telling those stories. I think we often see identities portrayed in very specific ways by people who don’t belong to those groups. With The PappyShow, we always say: you’re not being other people, you are being yourself - all aspects of yourself. We’re not asking you to turn into a character and create this fictitious life, we’re asking you to bring some of yourself here. And that’s exactly the same with What Do You See?. The stereotypes exist because our mind wants to categorise - it wants to put people into boxes - but we want to stretch out of those boxes a little bit and go: I’m more than that.

RW: The PappyShow’s work relies on a very strong use of physical movement, and non-verbal communication. Do you feel that over the years since you’ve run the company you’ve developed a very distinct physical vocabulary? Like, could someone point to a show and say, that’s The PappyShow?

SH: If you walk into a rehearsal room or training session of ours, most of the time we’ll be on the floor laughing – the joy sings out of the room. And I think that is also true of our shows. There’s a lot of silliness and a lot of play. We spend a lot of time playing games, actually, and that’s why when you come to see our work, there’s a lot of games in it. And if you come to see it on a Wednesday night, it’s doing to be different from the Thursday and the Friday because of the games we play. It’s the surprise of that in our shows that’s makes it exciting for us, as a company and for the audience too. You could see every night of a run and there’s going to be a surprise in each performance for us, and for you!

KH: I think our style is quite authentic. For us, it’s never about the moves. You couldn’t point at some set moves and say they’re PappyShow moves. It’s always the intention; it’s full of feeling and it really celebrates how that person moves. We say our work is about using your voice and using your body to tell your story.

RW: And finally, how are you going to keep that joy alive going forward? Or, what are your future plans for the company?

KH: Work and friendship go hand-in-hand for us. The two things are so interwoven and the friendship is so important that we’d happily drop all of the work – if we had to – to invest in the friendship. And that seems radical enough in our capitalist way of working, to prioritise joy over money or working or hierarchy or being the boss. We radically choose not to do that. So part of What Do You See? is that it starts off asking the audience what do you literally see with your eyes, but really it’s about what your body feels, how you experience me and how we can have healthier relationships which are rich with belonging.

SH: Yeah, I don’t have much to add to that! We lead from a place of feeling. If this doesn’t feel right, we stop.

thepappyshow.co.uk

London International Mime Festival
12 Jan - 6 Feb 2022
mimelondon.com