Prophecy - first Stepping Stone

Part One in a planned trilogy of projects “Stepping Stones to the Millennium” loosely themed past, present and future. Prophecy was about visions of the future from the past and took place in the former Boots warehouse in Tremorfa, Cardiff in December 1997. It was our first collaboration with director Orit Azaz and involved a core team of about 50 professional practitioners and circus performers, 12 local community groups and 20 students and tutors from the Interactive Arts BA at University of Wales, Newport Campus: a total of about 300 people.

We were keen to involve as many different groups and disciplines as possible, so as well as youth drama, community dance and music groups, our own Splott State Circus and the visual and interactive artists, we recruited battle re-enactors, skateboarders and, nearly, some Hells Angels.

We wanted to create an immersive experience for the audience in a large warehouse space, an installation / environment with visual and interactive artworks that would then become the setting for a promenade show. We also wanted to explore how to integrate different creative and cultural forms into a coherent theatrical language.

Prophecy was devised and produced over a 12 week period. We started with a brief for community and student groups which included lots of different information, sources, inspiration and quotes about the prophecy themes we were interested in and invited their creative responses. We worked mainly with the group leaders at this stage, they came back with some preliminary creative ideas and we selected one for each group that we felt would be most effective for our context. Orit then worked with writer Andy Rashleigh to create a narrative framework for these ‘jigsaw puzzle pieces’ and in parallel, we designed the set, structures and technical infrastructure and recruited professional and semi-professional circus and theatre performers to form a core team who would rehearse for 2 weeks and perform the linking script.

Prophecy became a story about visions of the future from the past, the relationship between prophecies and politics, and the way in which prophecies have been used throughout history to manipulate and control. When the audience arrived, they encountered a striking and atmospheric environment and a collection of interactive and visual art installations, introducing the prophecy themes. The performance took place in the same space, above, around and through the audience; the pieces created by our community collaborators were integrated into the overall performance.

Prophecy was an epic adventure and we were excited by the possibilities of this larger scale immersive work. We learnt a huge amount about the challenges of devising and rehearsing new work of this scale, creating a coherent story and working with such a wide range of talents and skill levels. We were fortunate to be able to put this learning into practice the next year.