It is pouring with rain and the mist has obscured the view across the hills and out to the sea. You are part of a group of twenty or so performers, writers and directors pressing along ancient Neolithic tracks that have been created over thousands of years by meandering hill sheep.
You arrive at what seems at first to be a pile of rocks and boulders and before long the rain has gone and the sun is scorching down as a renowned director of experimental theatre exhorts the group to change into evening wear 50s style ? complete with ties and heels ? and shoots the first of many takes based on choreography painstakingly invented in the studio and now perfected in the open air. Welcome to west Wales and the CPR International Summer School, writes Antony Pickthall.
For the past three years the Centre for Performance Research?s International Summer School has offered performance students and practitioners from around the world the chance to experience new and unusual training methods, gain skills, explore creativity, devise work that embraces voice, physical and visual theatre and enjoy the beauty of the landscape. It is not a holiday and it is not simply training. It is two weeks of hard work, learning and devising new creative processes whilst getting ?fit? physically, vocally and imaginatively.
The programme is led by Artistic Director Richard Gough, and what began as an opportunity for personal development has matured into an advanced experiment designed to hothouse new and radical approaches to performance. Making a virtue of its isolation and distance from city life, we explore the concept of ?located practice? through the use of field trips across west Wales to the Preseli mountains and the Pembrokeshire coast, and this year we?re sailing out to a small island. Our interest in the local landscapes began in 1989 with the first of our ?Summer Retreats? held at Druidstone in west Wales. Since then, even the simple act of walking has been an important aspect of this engagement ? walks both with and without a defined purpose. What has emerged most strongly is a notion of ?located? storytelling ? exploring the use of landscape as a trigger for memory and an opportunity to interpret existing stories in a fresh and vital way.
Our previous summer schools have all explored the landscape (?Landscape and the Body?, ?Landscapes and the Senses?), and this year ?Landscape and the portrait? will be taking the British photographer Richard Avendon?s assertion that ?all portraiture is performance? as its starting point. Participants will be able to explore this through photographic and performance practice.
It is the make-up of each school that determines its direction. Establishing a strong mix of nationalities, age groups and backgrounds ensures that most people, no matter who they are and where they are from, learn something new and encounter different points of view. We have learnt that by keeping the programme open and flexible, but at the same time guided and planned, is crucial to meeting the needs of each individual. Bringing together a 22- year old actress from the Lebanon at the beginning of her career and a retired architect from Spain in his early 70s during ?Landscapes of the Senses? last year, was a particularly enriching experience. ?It reminds you of what real dialogue and exchange should be about,? said Richard Gough.
Antony Pickthall is Marketing and Development Director at the Centre for Performance Research. t: 01970 622133; e: aop@aber.ac.uk; w: http://www.thecpr.org.uk