Putting Performance back in its Place

‘Theatre… always involves placing. Derived from the Greek thea, it has (at least) two interconnected meanings, the activity of putting into place, placing, and secondly, the creation of a place from which to see.’

– Andrew Quick, The Stay of Illusion, Performance Research (2009).

Hatch is a mobile Nottingham-based performance platform that showcases live work from emerging and established artists in the East Midlands.  It is an incubator for new work from the region and an opening onto the art scene for artists that might not normally have access to venues here.  Since its inception, nine events have happened in eight locations across the city (and one outside it, in Skegness).  Each event invited artists to respond to its location and to chime with a theme. Helen Cole, in Performance and Place writes of ‘live art leaking from the building’.  We devised Hatch in response to the sense that live art was leaking from our city.  As Quick tells us, the most important aspect is placing.   Hatch aims to find a suitable context for each event to take place and to create a place from which to see the work, to open the hatch.

We began in the pub.  A series of conversations started as idle discussion and resulted in a plan for action, a Hatchifesto.  We found it hard to describe exactly what we were, and hoped that could be our strength.  We wanted to work with the kind of people who don’t know how to describe themselves either, people who wear too many hats.  We knew that the only types of performance we wanted to be associated with were all of them.  We coined a new word – performance-y – to umbrella the live work we show.  Some see it as a broad brushstroke to include multiple forms of performance, from live art to stand up, monologues to music.  Others see it as an apology. A sort of disclaimer.  Maybe it can be both.  We put out the call to Nottingham artists.  We decided that Hatch would embrace work that often succeeds but is unafraid to fail.  We wanted to make a place which made success more likely and failure less scary.  We wanted to showcase the kind of work that sweats on a low budget.  That people’s parents would find ‘interesting’.  So far, especially in Skegness, we have succeeded.

We began again in the pub.  We wanted the places we made to be social and collaborative springboards as much as they were showcase stages.  We wanted people to watch, but we also wanted them to join in, to drink, to talk and to find their own way around.  The Maze, with its rich history of performance and generous present of supporting local culture, became the perfect host venue for Hatch: Beginnings.  Since then the platform event has grown exponentially from six acts in a back room to 20 acts in 10 venues along a whole street in the city centre, showcasing over 100 artists’ work to over 1000 people during that time.  We began to realise that we couldn’t stop the live art, the theatre, the music from leaking out of the building, onto the streets and then into somewhere else – rows of temporary performance venues networked by a ribbon of flowing spectators. Sometimes the street leaks back in.  When three identically dressed women stood guard in a doorway at Hatch: One, holding bunches of flowers over their prostrate companion, the people who saw them couldn’t tell anymore if it was a deliberate performance or a hen night gone wrong. Even after the ambulance arrived many were still unsure.

For Hatch: Abroad, we did something we’d never done before.  We hired a theatre. Nottingham Arts Theatre on George Street has a long and proud local history housing amateur dramatic performances.  It exhibits an architecture, a décor and a theatrical sensibility from another time with its 50s austerity, worn velvet seats and a peeling proscenium arch.  The ushers wore shirts and ties.  We commissioned the Nottingham-based company, Reckless Sleepers, to launch the event with The Pilots, a meta-theatrical experiment in pretending.  The performance was both a site-specific response to the theatre as a context and also served as a signal of our intent.  A declaration that Hatch was able to programme a contemporary company with a 20 year history in a theatre with a traditional reputation alongside a recent Fine Art graduate from Nottingham Trent University – Meg Tait - dressed up as a rat in a shop window.  Other artists performed in pub basements, tea rooms, restaurants, cinema foyers and the street itself.

With Hatch: It’s About Time we’re trying something new again.  After spilling out of the building, we’re now spilling out of the city.  We’re linking Leicester to Nottingham, a castle to a museum to an arts centre to a university, with a thread the length of a month.  Tracing the steps between locations and finding ways to guide audiences through space and time.  We want to know how the artists we’ll be working with will investigate history, project themselves across the future or illustrate the architecture of time.  But we’re also interested in finding the ideas whose time has come, whose moment is now.  It is important to us that Hatch is a verb and a noun.  That it acts both as an incubator for new ideas and an opening onto a performing arts community.  We’re enormously proud that It’s About Time is a part of Sideshow, something which is already turning up the heat and opening