Ahead of the premiere of Institute at the Sydney Festival, the AU speaks with Amit Lahav, Artistic Director of the Gecko Theatre Company, who are bringing the show to Australia from the UK for an exclusive three night run.
Can you talk about Institute and it’s meaning; how it came to life?
It takes me about three years to make a Gecko show. It’s a year of developing a seed idea, which I test out in various workshops and residencies. And that seed idea was to do with care. How we care about each other or how we don’t care about each other and a whole range of circulating things around that.
Politically, care was being used endlessly as a currency. But also evolutionary, how does care function? These are some of the questions that were bubbling around in my head that I was testing out physically with students and so forth after getting the sense of it was a robust seed. I started to work with performers and to work technically and then it became something where I didn’t really know what we were entering into. It certainly became something that I needed to physically create structure around people that felt unstable, I suppose, in some way.
There was something that started to emerge which was almost like an office, where you trie to order your emotional disorder – let’s put it like that. What has evolved, to cut a long story short, the institute is a world where there are patients and there are carers; you don’t ever really know who actually is administering the care and who is in need of the care. The reason I’m drawn to things like this is because the feeling for mem is that they reflect the world that I see around me and the world that we live in.
So often, you have people in care who often have come through a process themselves of needing care. Also, the show is experienced by people [for whom] care or mental health or anything along that line isn’t experienced at all and that is also very purposefully seeded into the piece. It’s about how we live life, actually.
Although those ideas are in there, some people just see an officious dystopian world where there are 3, 4, 5, metre high filing cabinets where you’ve got to meet deadlines and so forth. It’s very multi layered and tends to be experienced incredibly personally and [is] very different from one person to the next
You gave direction to the cast about caring and being cared for. Did they come back with their own ideas for them personally, that ended up being part of the direction as well?
For sure. It’s a very long process. Two years in and out of the studio. I’m reliant on so much on the performers in terms of… First of all, physically how they respond to the tasks that are played out in the room – the improvisation, the choreography that we make and so forth. But also, that has to come from somewhere internal. So, if I ask them about loss or about what depression feels like and where that might come from, they’ve got to feel their way through that and they have to talk about that. There are of course, also many occasions in the rehearsal room where they talk about their own experiences of life, which then becomes something that gets seeded into the characters’ journey as well.
With physical theatre, do you find it difficult to make sure the audience is able to follow that part of the story and not get too lost in the chaos that can be happening on stage?
First of all, it would be very easy for me to nail down every moment in the show and say, ‘This is what this is about and this is what I want you to think here’, but that is something that I am incredibly uninterested in and don’t have any objective to try to steer the audience down one route. In fact if we left the auditorium and I spoke to audience members – which I do every night – and there was a collective singular narrative that everyone experienced, I would immediately feel that I’d failed and I would start changing the show. Which is to say that a Gecko narrative tends to be quite a simple narrative that is very complex in its detail and that has an endless set of sign posts which say, ‘Input the narrative of your life here, input the narrative of your life here, here and here, as it were.’ So that it isn’t narratively chaotic at all, there is space purposefully created to make it feel that it is about you.
By the time the show is finished, the most interesting and the most poignant narratives are the audience’s narratives. They become the final authors of the piece and when you talk to people (as I hope you will as well), you’ll find out that someone who talks about… whether it’s the loss of a parent or whether it’s the absurdity of bureaucracy and whatever. Or whether it’s about struggling in a way that they haven’t realised they were struggling; you’ll realise the power of what’s happening, the experience of what’s happening on stage is so much more than if it was simply about me trying to get people to understand my narrative. It’s a big, big ask. We’re saying, ‘This works.’ Actually it works purely because it is so beautiful and it is pretty spectacularly played out. But it really, really works when you dive in and we meet somewhere in the middle. That’s when it really works. It also works if you sit there and it washes over you, because it’s stunning. Over the last decade, I’ve heard six distinct ways that a Gecko show works on people and the best way is if it’s about you.
Sydney Festival. What does it mean to be a part of this and for Institute and for Gecko to be coming to Sydney and showing the work here?
It’s been something that I’ve wanted to do for at least 10 years, so it’s a huge ambition to play there. That’s number one. One of the reasons for that [is] its commitment to society, really, and its commitment to community is a bit unlike anything else, in that so much of the festival is free and it is available for everyone, which I love. I think that’s the way to do a festival.
I think there’s something about it which means that you have the potential, from what I understand. You have the opportunity to reach people, people in society and people in the city and that to me, is the very best place to be when you’re doing something like this. To reach people that haven’t seen loads of stuff like this before. To reach people that haven’t experienced this kind of theatre as well. I feel we’ve got the honour of introducing a very unique style to Sydney audiences. The pressure’s up in the best possible way.
The Sydney Festival brings in quite a different crowd. The Sydney festival crowd is very much about talking after the theatre and talking about it.
The show is very funny as well, and I’m hoping that it will connect with some sort of cultural humour and some sort of cultural way of laughing at life as well!
Institute plays at the Seymour Centre’s Everest Theatre from January 25th – 28th as part of the Sydney Festival. Visit the official event page here for more information.
Photo by Richard Haughton.
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