We create performance within a range of contexts including, but not limited to full-length touring shows, short-length works, site-responsive performance events and educational projects. We enjoy exploring connections between the personal and political, emotional and factual, sacred and profane. We approach work with a spirit of curiosity and play and often collaborate with other performers, artists, designers, composers and writers. We like to take creative risks in which failure and success are equally productive options.

Our work rarely tells a singular, linear story but rather offers the elements from which the audience can construct his or her own account. Performers, costumes, objects, sets, lighting, music and language crafted to provoke maximum engagement of the audiences’ imagination and intelligence. Characters, events, relationships and places, real and imagined, are expressed using evocative narration, dialogue, music, action and choreography, props that suggest but do not dictate, and set pieces that transform to create images beyond what they appear. Questions are raised but not fully answered. Thus the performance does not achieve its full meaning or potential until it engages with the audiences’ own creativity.

Elements are layered to hold the audience’s attention on several levels at a time so that familiar material can be seen fresh or difficult subject matter can approached in surprising ways. To do this, we often employ populist techniques such puppetry, clown, improvisation, and illusion; forms that allow the audience an indirect or distanced identification with the thematic content. These forms, combined with a generous and playful performer’s presence keep the audience’s attention partly focused on the real-time experience of the performance whilst at the same time drawing them into the emotional realm and theatre magic. The result may be funny but challenging, affirming yet somehow subversive.

We are inspired by other artists who work with this kind of simultaneity, particularly writers John Berger, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Photographer Jan Saudek, artists Christian Boltanski and Mona Hatoum, directors John Wright, Phelim McDermott, Simon McBurney, and others. We enjoy when the resulting juxtaposition have a humorous or illuminating effect and reveal something about a wider, more universal experience. We aim for this in our own work.

In the face of vast cynicism and commercialism, we still believe that performance has the possibility to inspire awe and delight; that it can be a transformative and awakening event. When we have created a performance that we are absolutely certain has achieved this, we will happily retire.