Sustainability

A growing number of us struggle with consumerism and how it is celebrated as a sustainable way of life. I tend to avoid town centres until the shops are closed and the bars and venues are open. If I need to purchase something I have to do so with near military tactical precision, because when faced with the variety and quantity of things available on any given day in any high street up and down the country, it acts as a complete deterrent. Knowing how bountiful shops are these days takes away any sense of urgency about actually making a purchase. It’s overwhelming to see the throngs of people dashing about spending their money on such a trivial array of items. As a result I’ve always gravitated towards theatre companies whose ethics are built around reusing and recycling whatever we can to provide props, sets and costumes for shows. Sabotage do this to an exemplary standard.

Our sets are kept to an absolute minimum, and at the end of each tour staging is returned to our homes to provide some other function - as storage boxes or a wardrobe for example. Sets are the largest items in our inventory so there’s a huge amount of waste saved by creating locations within the world of a play with pieces that we already have to hand. Using smaller sets also allows us to travel in a smaller vehicle which reduces our carbon footprint and the cost of transporting things. As a result, the set design is really distinctive because there’s a mix of realism, with the homely and familiar, but everything is used in such a way that shows anything is possible, which amuses audiences and challenges them to engage their imagination. A wardrobe, originally found in the bin room at a company member’s flat, might serve as a call centre or a bedroom in one scene and later become a radio studio or a perilous cliff edge, simply by reframing the way the puppets and characters interact with it. The set starts to take on a life and character of its own. And whilst it’s not the easiest thing in the world to arrive in a field at a festival with a wardrobe in tow, especially when you have to find your way through crowded woodlands, it certainly makes for an intriguing conversation starter and an interesting experience sleeping in amongst furniture and props in our wonderful tent.

Our costumes over the years have been another example of sustainability and ingenuity. Our artistic director Zoe is creative in every capacity, including costume design. She has made detailed period pieces and timeless travelling attire fashioned - seemingly effortlessly - out of scraps of material, old curtains and all sorts. Zoe has an encyclopaedic understanding of how fashion has evolved through the centuries and she makes up patterns almost intuitively. To find clothes that would even be a nod to such styles would otherwise involve a huge treasure hunt and probably at great expense. Instead it’s just another aspect of Sabotage’s work that surprises audiences - the fact that everything has been made or found or borrowed. Surely we’d all have a greater quality of life if every household had a dressing up box regardless of the age of its inhabitants! And it’s an important message for our audience that they can create things themselves rather than slaving and saving to buy things from other people. On the rare occasions when we do need to make a purchase - such as black clothes for base costumes for puppeteers - our actors find it very strange to be wearing something that isn’t second hand.

We often end our performances by inviting people to come and explore the stage, to see how the world they’ve just discovered is held together and to try for themselves wearing a particularly cumbersome piece of costume or leading one of the puppets across the playing space. It’s wonderful to be reminded of our sense of play and to delight in discovering the mechanics and mysteries of how things are made. The puppets and masks are absolutely beautiful. They demonstrate yet again how production values can reflect effort and imagination rather than expenditure. Especially when the characters are made using once discarded items. We’ve had goldfish built around old cycle helmets so they can work as puppets which can be manipulated by our actors which then are easily transformed into masks for the actors to wear. We’ve had the Sisters of Sleep, three dreamy radio presenters created using old milk cartons from the recycling. Check out Zoe’s puppet making video on our social media if you’ve not seen it already as we’d love you to try this out yourselves at home and send us some photos of the characters you can create.

Zoe would be the first to remind me that creating puppets from found items has been a real learning process. In one of the early shows on the horse drawn tour for ‘The Looker’ our puppet Vida’s foot fell off halfway through a performance and had to be hastily reattached at the interval before anyone noticed. Touring takes its toll on us all and our puppet characters are no different - poor Vida’s joints were weary from travel. As we live outside whilst we’re on the road bringing all our props and set with us, everything has to be artistic first and foremost, but it also has to be hardy enough to survive in the great outdoors. Our puppets need protection from the elements, whether its varnish to keep off the rain or reinforcements to cope with the heat, they need to be treated with as gently as the rest of us. During a particularly hot and crowded performance the handle fell off another puppet, the Bin Man, causing his face to rotate a full 360 degrees. Fortunately our quick thinking actress who was working him incorporated this as a response in character to the action on the stage. Our audiences are well used to surreal moments in Sabotage’s storytelling so it didn’t seem at all out of place. It’s magical to see the transformation from odds and ends to characters and costumes that are ready to be inhabited. One minute there’s a call out for everyone to save the corks from their wine bottles, and before you know it you’re sitting opposite an octopus with cork suckers covering the underside of their tentacles as they dance across the stage. We’ve not quite got to the point where we’re running our van on recycled chip oil, but we have used it to fuel torches to light plays when we’ve been out in the wilds.

So I suppose the moral of the story is that if you’re ever helping us to pack down after a show, make sure you don’t throw anything away - not even the end of an old toilet roll or a couple of used banana skins - as it might be important for one of our more dreamlike sequences on stage. It is a credit to our actors and puppeteers that they are able to endow the simplest and most unusual of items with such vibrancy and life. They understand that the essence of all theatre is play and so many magic moments in the shows evolve out of the magic and awe that our actors bring to discovering new ways to use, understand and interact with the objects that they find in rehearsals. It’s crucial too to see the crossover between our working ethos and the characters that the audiences engage with. When we’re telling stories about the malaise of modern life and the frustrations of seeing so much squandered by society it’s important that that is reflected in the props and costumes and set. It gives the characters all the more integrity when the telling of their stories isn’t dependent on disposable things. It’s easy to forget that consumerism is addictive and like any addiction it alters our behaviour and our sense of morality. The more reliant we are on external resources the more easily we are manipulated. That’s why it is so liberating to remind ourselves and each other that there is another way.

We are told there’s a scarcity of resources in all sorts of scenarios so that we are more inclined to act in self interest in order to distract us from more important issues. There’s endless enjoyment to be had in sharing and appreciating the resources that are all around us, and there is such a rewarding sense of satisfaction in creating something out of nothing. Now more than ever it is important to maintain our faith that creativity and expression are sustainable regardless of the limitations of our resources. Time in isolation has amplified the importance of connection and community, and how better to strengthen that than in the sharing of stories?

Words by Zinta Gercans