I decided to work in a Cornish wood and make this site

our script and our stage. At a stroke the conventional

expectations were gone and we were free to play and
explore. Characters walked through woods with teacakes,
a spurned lover was carried away on a raft, Caruso sang
on a wind up gramophone and to enter a clearing you
pressed a doorbell on a tree.
Embracing the outside I found you could create worlds
with a lightness of touch, tell story with just a few clues
and an extraordinary team who enjoyed working in this
way and didn’t mind getting wet.
We use fire, clay, cake, ice, weather, the sea, the
moon and sunsets as our narrative. And people.
Especially people. The meaning of this work, the reason
WILDWORKS exists is the need I have to work in real
place and with the people who belong to that place.
Over the years the WILDWORKS team has grown
the ability of listening to and absorbing people, local When I first made work in
characters, volunteers, specialist groups, partners and the landscape something
audiences into the warp and weft of our productions.
Their authentic voice infuses with ours.
clicked into place
Bill Mitchell, Director

WILDPRODUCTIONS
 WILDWORKS
WILDWORKS is an art led international theatre company founded in 2005 by
Bill Mitchell to focus on site-specific events. WILDWORKS makes landscape
theatre - large scale spectacular performances and artworks that grow out of
their locations: quarries, cliffs, harbours, derelict industrial sites, castles, empty
department stores…
Narrative is at the centre of our work. We bring the seeds of a story to a site
and weave in the strands that tie people and place together.
As a company we are drawn to stories that are both epic and intimate, human
stories that can touch and resonate with audiences across barriers of language,
age and nationality.
The WILDWORKS approach to place and community is distinctive.
The meaning of the work develops from research, from chance encounters,
from probing the feelings, thoughts, stories and memories of people. This is
the creative heartbeat, found by attending carefully to the place, the genius
loci, and working in a spirit of mutual hospitality with the people who inhabit
the physical space. We work in both rural and urban settings, often choosing
to work in locations and with communities that are facing dramatic change –
finding new purpose after the collapse of traditional industry, post-conflict, or
on the brink of radical development.
We believe that this way of working touches people in profound ways. We
have seen its effect, felt it. We have been energised and humbled by it. It has
uncovered layers of meaning and resonance that we have found missing in the
conventional theatre process. This work attracts new audiences, people who
have never wanted to go to the theatre, and makes them active. We create
sensory worlds where everything is narrative: the light, the night, distance and
closeness, from vast to tiny, a flag on the horizon, a character holding a rose so
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings | Hayle, Cornwall 2005
close you can smell it.
WILDWORKS
I see WILDWORKS as a vehicle for
exploration and experiment.
The work is directly connected to
place, and the people of that place.
Bill Mitchell | WILDWORKS Director

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings | Malta 2003 The Beautiful Journey | Wallsend, Tyneside 2009
WILDPRODUCTIONS
 WILDPROCESS
WILDWORKS has developed ways of working with communities and giving
voice to their values, memories, fears and aspirations. Our methods rely utterly
on mutual trust and generosity. We believe that our engagement with a place
and its people can only become meaningful through immersing ourselves in the
WILDWORKS genuinely empowers location. This work takes time. The duration is necessary to build relationships,
communities and builds a legacy to exchange knowledge, build together, bring into play the knowledge and
sensitivity of everyone (the artists’ as well as the residents’) and produce a
The Guardian
performance which evokes meaning not only at the local level but also at the
universal.
We start the process with detailed preliminary research around the place
and the people who inhabit it. We gather memories, images and stories from
community members. We hold conversations about the community’s fears and
aspirations. We hold events, tea parties and community celebrations to facilitate
hospitable spaces where residents may talk to each other. We make ourselves
at home and accept hospitality. The stories and images we gather are woven
into the fabric of the show. In this way communities experience both a sense of
ownership and of connection with other communities that have contributed to
the show.
WILDWORKSHOPS are an integral part of the process. We use Landscape
Summer Schools to bind new working groups together, to teach outdoor
performance skills, and to generate a working culture of open-hearted creativity.
We understand the power of this work in building confidence and pride in host
communities. The relationship with the community is honest and clear. We need
them. It’s a truly authentic partnership. We are not doing it because it is good
for them. We need them to make the work happen.
It gives participants a reaffirming experience of art, celebrating what they do,
whether they are crane driver, artist or town councillor. It places their culture,
Souterrain |. Dolcoath, Cornwall 2007
aptitudes and environment centre stage.
WILDPROCESS
 I think we can call it a 150% European
project. Bill Mitchell knows how to make
all the artists from different horizons work
together. We must continue working on
projects that lead the audience, that enable
things to be owned and shared, linking
community with artistic production
Philippe Berthaud | Co-Director of the Viva Cité Outdoor Theatre Festival
Director of Cultural Affairs at Sotteville-lès-Rouen

The Beautiful Journey, WildWorkshop | Devonport Guildhall 2009 Souterrain |. Dolcoath, Cornwall 2007
 WILDPLACES
WILDWORKS’ emotional home is Cornwall, where the work started and where
many company members live. Our practice draws together several threads
that are defining features of the arts and culture ecology of Cornwall. Our
work draws its form and inspiration from our geographical peripherality, our
extraordinary natural and post-industrial landscapes and from the diversity of
artists and art-forms working in close proximity in a narrow peninsula…
Our physical environments are heavily marked by the history of human activity,
written into the landscape in so many ways we scarcely notice. We started
to explore these narratives of place in Cornwall, but our work has taken us to
many different locations: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings flew over the
Grand Harbour in Valletta, the Green Line in Nicosia and a working fishing quay
in Hayle, Cornwall. Souterrain explored underworlds in seven venues from the
coalfields of Northern France to the tin mines of the far Cornish West. The
Beautiful Journey launched a boat each night from the Royal Navy Dockyards
in Devonport and from the shipyards on the Tyne. Enchanted Palace conjured
up the shadows of seven sad princesses out of the shaken fabric of Kensington
Palace during renovation works.
The landscape has ghosts; it has narrative and it has meaning. In each
new residency we look for powerful locations that have deep resonance for
communities in transition.
The event grows on site. Working in the open landscape demands truth above
Souterrain remains one of the all else - you are working in a very real world, unlike the fictional worlds we
great shows of the century create in studios and theatres. So we choose to work with real materials -
****The Guardian
water, salt, ice, fire, earth. We use local materials whenever we can – in Malta
wreckage from the local boatyard; in Hayle rusting steel ladders from the quay
and live spider crabs; in Devonport and Tyneside, cranes, scissor lifts, welding
Souterrain |. Dolcoath, Cornwall 2007
equipment. The place is the story is the place.
WILDPLACES
 My participation in the project …
was one of the most important
experiences in my life
Michalis Terlikkas Singer & Performer

A Very Old Man The

withBeautiful
EnormousJourney The Green Royal
Wings | Devonport Line, Nicosia, Cyprus 2009
Navy Dockyard 2004 The Beautiful Journey | Wallsend, Tyneside 2009
WILDPRODUCTIONS
Suspend all expectations of
a traditional experience
The New York Times | Enchanted Palace

Enchanted Palace | Kensington Palace, London 2010–2012

WILDPRODUCTIONS
WILDWORKS celebrates as well
WILDPeople
as catalysing and empowering The world feels to be a place full of fear and terror where people retreat into
The Stage the comfort of the familiar. It’s vital for the meaning of our work that it has an
international agenda, that we engage with other ways of seeing the world.
This internationalism is reflected in the make up of the team, its music, the
language used in the work and the international residencies and links we
choose to make.
The WILDWORKS extended company includes British, Polish, French, Swedish,
Roma, Spanish, Cypriot and Maltese at the last count. We do not share a mother
tongue and we often work in non-English speaking locations. It somehow sets
us all in a space where difference is valued. We all start as strangers, nothing is
taken for granted, not even that we will speak the same language… In A Very
Old Man With Enormous Wings we devised a hybrid European language, drawing
from Latin, Greek, Italian, Cornish, Spanish, Japanese and English. The language
grew organically out of our multinational company and became richer as we
travelled. In Souterrain we used French and English as mirrors of each other and
audiences on both sides of the Channel were able to both understand their own
language and listen to the music of the other.
But our passion is in finding ways to tell our story that go beyond spoken
language. We look for the universal languages of music, song, food, gardening,
ritual, emotion. We work with music, performance, installation, singing,
gardening, cooking, engineering, digital media; we enrol communities in
contributing their skills to the story telling, forming choirs and scratch
orchestras, building and making things, fishing, tending plants, handling boats.
With each production the WILDWORKS temporary community expands; new,
unexpected, connections are made that often endure beyond the time-span of
The Beautiful Journey | Devonport Royal Navy Dockyard 2009
the show.
WILDPeople
 The Beautiful Journey was a wonderful
adventure: a leap of faith, a holding of breath and
a jump into the great unknown. The outcome was
a very special shared theatrical experience for
the associate artists, the volunteers, the partners
and the audiences. At all times it was clear that
an extraordinarily rich and generous process
was taking place, led by the creative team that
is WILDWORKS, that set a very clear artistic
context whilst embracing the creativity of those
also making the journey.
Stella Hall | Creative Director | culture10 | NewcastleGateshead, world-class culture

Souterrain |. Dolcoath, Cornwall 2007 A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings | Hayle, Cornwall 2005
 WILDSTORIES
WILDWORKS collect human stories that touch and resonate across boundaries
of language, age and nationality. Each WILDWORKS major production has
travelled to different locations, sometimes over two or three years.
A common narrative arc binds different productions of the same show together;
yet each reflects and reinforces the power of local distinctiveness. Intensive
engagement with communities locks the central story into the lives, experiences
and memories of the people who live in the physical spaces occupied by each of
the final productions.
In each of our shows the story we tell becomes like a palimpsest, like one of
those old medieval documents that had been erased and written over time after
time. As we travel, the story grows. In A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
we wanted to explore how a self-sustaining community might be affected by
dramatic change. In Malta we learned about the power of memory in affirming
identity. In Nicosia young Turkish and Greek Cypriot performers made the
epiphanic discovery that their villages, which had been separated for 26 years,
danced the same dance. Souterrain explored themes of death, lost love, grief
and renewal through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The geography of our
underworld was mapped from Arcadian villages in Sussex, the fields of graves
of the Somme, the mining landscapes of Bethune and Dolcoath. At the Alzheimer
hospital in Sotteville-les-Rouen we considered the fate of those who have
crossed Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. In Beautiful Journey a confidence
whispered by a sailor’s wife over tea and cake at a school fête and a chance
conversation with two retired shipbuilding brothers at a Devonport pub became
leit motivs in the production.
We always search for the meaning of our narrative in the emotional attachment
The Beautiful Journey | Wallsend, Tyneside 2009
between people and environment. This is the flesh on the story’s bones.
WILDSTORIES
 In the end we wanted to follow them.
We did not even notice that we were
all speaking different languages…
Christine Gaillard | Arts Officer, Rouen, France

Title of project DATE | whatever you want to say about it Souterrain |. Dolcoath, Cornwall 2007
WILDPRODUCTIONS
 WILDPRODUCTIONS
WILDWORKS constructs a sensory mix of theatre, ritual, film, music, visual arts
A life experience rather than and physical theatre that appeals to both head and heart. The company uses
whatever is necessary to drive the narrative - forklift trucks, cranes, winches,
a theatre production state-of-the-art lighting, sound and projection systems. The strongest instinct is
Audience Member | The Beautiful Journey always to tell the story with and through people.
Our work attracts new audiences, audiences that don’t normally go to the
theatre. We actively seek these audiences, inviting them to become part of the
worlds we create through engagement with the action, the site, the weather,
food and drink, music...For the duration of the show audience and company
become a temporary community. This is one of the strengths of this work.
An audience for a piece of landscape theatre behaves completely differently to a
conventional theatre audience. They become more alert, looking for clues. Their
senses are heightened. They are more aware of each other and of experiencing
something new together. The audience is a character, they develop their role as
the story develops. They tend to start as voyeurs, then begin to get involved in
an active way, as we enrol them in our world. They become protagonists gently.
This isn’t traditional ‘audience participation’, but rather, a range of subtle
invitations to become temporary residents in the world of the show. We always
treat them with respect, never asking them to pretend to be something they
are not.
With the promenade experience the audience cannot be a passive observer;
they become involved in the performance, they share in the created world, they
are an implicit element of the narrative. By using this technique we are asking
audiences to engage more with the meaning of the work; we continue to explore
The Beautiful Journey | Devonport Royal Navy Dockyard 2009
how far this engagement can go.
WILDPRODUCTIONS
 WILDWORKS creates striking
outdoor performances that tap into
myth, play with ritual and connect
audiences to a very specific place
Lyn Gardner |The Guardian

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings | The Green Line, Nicosia, Cyprus 2004 Memory Projector | The Merchant City Festival, Glasgow 2009
WILDPRODUCTIONS
WILDWORKS have produced amongst
the very best site-specific pieces I
have seen in Europe. The artistic rigor,
the commitment to the inclusion of
non professionals in the making of the
work, the understanding of site and an
audiences’ response to that site and
the emotional power of the piece itself
are all to be praised.
This is fully accessible ‘event theatre’
of the highest calibre.
David Micklem | Joint Artistic Director, BAC London