Reaching Coventry: Beginning the Community Workshops for The Great Middlemarch Mystery
The first of the four Coventry-based community workshops that will inform the creative process of our upcoming immersive theatre production, The Great Middlemarch Mystery, took place last November. We caught up with Cristina Catalina, Dash Arts’ producer, about the workshops and what’s next for participants, as well as how these workshops explore the ‘little gems of detail’ that will contribute to our theatre show that opens in Coventry in April 2022.
Photo of R&D workshop for The Great Middlemarch Mystery in Coventry, July 2021
Could you tell us what these workshops are and what their purpose is?
The workshops for The Great Middlemarch Mystery are built to enable participants, regular people who live locally to Coventry, to come into contact with Dash and the way we work, and for Dash to come into contact with people who might be interested in being in the show.
The show takes place across four different locations in the centre of Coventry. Audiences will travel through these locations either on their own or being led by the actor/stewards we call Middlepeople. It will start with everyone in one location, with the audience taking on roles they can change or ditch completely – it’s an offering to be playful. Crucially, each location will have about two or three Middlepeople who will help build the world of Middlemarch, who might be slightly different every performance. So we'll have a pool of 20 or so people who are creating this world across four locations during the 4-day run of the show.
For example, the Town Hall will have two stages; one will be the newspaper offices for the Pioneer Paper, where the journalists gather, and one will be Middlemarch Bazaar, a crafting/ribbon making and gossip stall (there’s a long history of ribbon making in Coventry). Our drama takes place in both of these stages. They will also be continually animated and activated by Middlepeople in each location. So, when you step in as an audience member, someone will come to you in character and playfully engage you in conversation.
We want these theatre workshops to give the opportunity to people who may want to have a fun day out, exploring a new activity with other people and making new connections. They may want to build new skills, uncover new ways of working, or to get involved with our Dash Arts practice. And, crucially, having the opportunity to become part of our production thereafter.
How do these workshops feed into the vision for the production and in what ways are they an important part of the creative process?
They’re an extremely important part. Though we are creating a script from the novel the show is based on, Middlemarch, a lot of the creation is in trying to figure out how the audience will interact with the world, particularly as there will be some moments and opportunities to also improvise. We can have plans in mind and words written on a page, but it’s extremely important to try them out in real life with real people to see how it might work.
We are holding four preliminary workshops before the rehearsals commence, exploring the four locations of the show. We held one in November which explored the bank, so in the next workshops we’ll be exploring the Town Hall, the pub and Mrs Vincy’s living room. All the locations are constantly animated, so we need to figure out: what is that buzz of activity? If you step into a bank or someone’s living room, what goes on day to day before any drama takes place? The Middlepeople are crucial to that.
For example, we discovered if five different pairs pretending to be bank clerks are all having conversations at the same time, it’ll be way too loud. So, some of those conversations have to be hushed and then we need to determine where the focus goes. The Middlepeople are crucial in determining how we move from simply enacting the world to taking the action further.
Tell us a bit about the people that participated in this workshop.
After the call-out, I asked those who were interested about their motivations for getting involved and their expectations. Their answers were really beautiful. People from all walks of life were keen to take part for all sorts of reasons; from having been involved in amateur dramatics and wanting to continue that; to loving and wanting to explore the novel; to having experienced a big life shift that has made them try to say yes to new experiences - so all really inspirational.
We are trying to also connect real people’s stories and lives in the roles the participants will be playing. So, the participants will create their own roles based on people they know. We asked everyone to bring in [the idea of] a person from the 80s (as we’re setting the show in the early 80s) that they knew or knew of. Some people brought a cousin, an uncle, a grandfather they may or may not know but know stories of. Someone even made up a character completely, which was amazing, and one lady brought her younger self. She had a picture of herself from when the factories first opened in Coventry, where she went from an entry level job to a manager… It was so moving to hear people sharing stories, to uncover little gems of detail.
What sort of activities did participants get up to in the workshop and how was it structured?
The workshop took place over two to three hours. We played games to ease everyone in and then Josephine, myself and Prof. Ruth Livesey (19th century literature whizz extraordinaire and our principal source text consultant) talked about the project and our aims, then we went straight to asking people to talk about the person they brought in.
After that we created moments of improvisation - simple theatre exercises to see how people engage with and listen to each other. We gave them an ingredients list of situations to devise any scenario they wanted, keeping in mind the character they wanted to explore. It was brilliant, people really went for it! We then looked at what worked and what didn’t, which brought the workshop to a satisfying close.
What were your main takeaways from this workshop and how did it go?
We were really humbled by how generous people were; it gave us a huge sense of confidence. Not only did 15 people come, but they gave so much to it, so much heart. The participants just ran with it, no matter what their level of experience, which was wonderful to see. It helped us understand how the world will operate, which has artistically informed the content of the show. I couldn’t have been more pleased with it.
What would you say to anyone who’s thinking about attending the next one?
Do it - it’s fun! It’s a great opportunity to do something you might have never done before, to play around with different worlds, different characters, to explore and push yourself to do something different . You can be as much or as little engaged as you like. You can do one workshop, you can do more or you could choose to be in the show!
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS
Thursday 24 February 2022, 6pm - 8.30pm
Wednesday 2 March 2022, 11am - 2pm & 6pm - 8.30pm
If you live in Coventry or the West Midlands and you’d like to register your interest in these community workshops, please email info@dasharts.org.uk with the subject line ‘Middlemarch workshop’. Find out more about the workshops here.
