Just Allow the Artists to Really be Free

Krysia Bednarek: What were the beginnings of Footsbarn Theatre?

Paddy Hayter: We started in Cornwall in the South West of England in 1971. We left in 1981 and travelled for 10 years.

KB: How was it in the 70s?

PH: For us, the first 10 years were formative. In the 70s, we were playing out on the streets, in the village halls, trying to find a way of creating that was our own. We got our first tent in 1975. Just a little canvas tent which we started to take with us to protect us from the rain and to give us our constant space that we could control and not subject our freedom to any institutional theatre.

Fredericka Hayter: In the 70s, it was a general movement. I don’t know how it was in Poland, but suddenly in England people were starting to really break the traditional form of theatre — play a lot in the open air, play in the round, and so on.

KB: How has your style developed through the years?

PH: It’s been somewhere else. We’ve worked with completely different cultures and languages so we had to communicate not only through the spoken word. When you work like this, you have to find a way through storytelling methods of narrators. But, of course, a great text is a great help, which is why we’ve done a lot of Shakespeare, Moliere, Victor Hugo, Steinbeck, Bulgakov… and more. Plus, our own original creations.

FH: We’ve always tried to develop a universal style that’s accessible to every culture and because of the travel it sort of sprang out of folk, local stories. Then it drew a lot from Shakespeare. In Italy they had the masks, the commedia. Then we saw this parade with drums and flags and it was incorporated in King Lear. In Spain we met this fantastic company called Els Comediants, and they have all the culture of giant puppets and big heads, and so we were influenced by that. Then we went to Bali and learnt to work with very amazing masks. Kabuki in Japan. It’s very mixed.

KB: Where did the idea to settle come from?

FH: We were very open to the idea of settling in Italy, so it was not France at first that really drew us, but then we had a production with the Avignon Festival and there was a man who was important in the cultural scene who really supported us.

PH: We were invited to play in a theatre near where we live now. It was a great chance for us. Olivier Perrier, a local theatre man, invited us to play a show called Babylon based on the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. And so we played at his theatre and he then invited us to visit his village, Hérisson. He showed us a site where they were going to build a studio for creating theatre and film and invited us to be the first to use it.

FH: In the 80s, France was very open and supportive of artists. It didn’t matter that we were English, even though we performed shows in English. We had come to the village where we are by chance, finding not only that the price of farm buildings was low and their availability was good but also that the local people were very open to our theatre because there’d already been a theatre here.

PH: And then it developed — now we have a beautiful set of old buildings, which were ruined when we bought them. They’ve been renovated and transformed into a cultural ‘free’ space. Over 30 people can live here, there are workshops for costumes and everything needed for production. Of course, there’s a place for a tent because the tent has always been part of us. When we travel, we take it with us. That way we always have our theatre with us. That’s what made us what we are.

KB: So, before you came to Hérisson, there was already a theatre there?

FH: Well, there was a little not-exactly-a-festival every year. Olivier Perrier, who was from a farming family, became an actor. He created shows for the village, site-specific. So, people were used to coming to these productions every year. He’s a bit of a local hero.

KB: What can resident artists do in your venue?

PH: There’s a rehearsal studio of 100 square meters, two tents, there’s place to build the sets, place for the costumes, for the props, the place to sleep up to 30 people, there’s a canteen for meals, there’s everything. And there are no distractions, just the cows and a short walk or bicycle ride to the village. It’s our place that we wish with all our hearts to keep going, to stay as a free artistic creative space, which is perfect for films — people have made films based there, festivals, social events, weddings… The whole infrastructure is there.

KB: Who is your audience?

PH: In the village there are 600 people. Our public comes locally and from all over. When we’re doing a new show, people will come from far away. But the local public also comes.

FH: Well, that’s always been the aim of Footsbarn to take theatre out of the towns into rural areas into places where there’s no theatre. Where there’s no access. And that’s why the philosophy of the tent is very important. It’s a small minority of people who go to theatre. Whereas when you go and play in a village, farmers help you put up the tent, then they come to the show and often people say that it’s the first time they’ve been to the theatre. So, we reach a completely different audience.

FH: Also, a lot of people come for different productions and then they like the area, so they decide to stay. So now there’re four companies in our village. Some of them are grandchildren of Footsbarn.

KB: And how did the story go after coming to Hérisson?

FH: We had two productions before we had our own building, just living in caravans. And we went from here to Moscow. We drove all the way and did this big trip, MIR Caravan. It was an amazing project. Crazy project.

KB: What was it about?

FH: It was during perestroika. The idea was to unite arts from the East and the West. So, there were Russian companies, one from Czechoslovakia, plus Italian, Polish, Spanish and French companies. Everyone got caravans, we organized tents and it was a whole huge thing. After Moscow we went to Leningrad (it was called Leningrad at the time), and from there we went to Warsaw, Prague, Copenhagen, Lausanne-Blois (the home town of Jacques Lang, then the French Minister of Culture), finishing in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris.

PH: It lasted for months. There were 200 artists on the road, there were marriages and births, people changing their birthday date, because if you had a birthday on that trip, you had a good party! It did make huge connections and friendships that are still there. We were playing just next to the Berlin Wall just before it came down.

FH: The French call the 70s, the 80s and 90s the thirty glorious years for culture. If we arrived now in France, it would be a completely different story. Everything’s closing in and down.

PH: Not to take a black side of it, but it is now going into a very dark phase again. There are so many rules now and so many statistics…

FH: Well, also it seems like people need more money now. Our theatre didn’t have a pay structure for 20 years. Back then, a lot of young people were ready just to go on the road, whereas now people have a much greater tendency to get into commitment to housing, rents, this, that. And they don’t have the kind of naive idealism that we had. Being part of a whole movement, changing society, changing the rules and being free. We were anti-consumerist. There’s that and there’s also the fact that now, since Covid, the funding is going down and down and down. So, there’s just no money for groups that are starting.

PH: There’s money in the big theatres, the official ones. They’ve got more people in the offices than on the stage. I think it’s a time now when those big places need to be a bit generous to the smaller and the artists rather than the system. Because in the end, the theatre isn’t a system, it’s an act.

FH: All around us people are losing all their funding. Normally people would react but everyone’s finding out at different times. All the places like we have, so the residency places run by companies, where they live and where other artists come to create shows — they’re losing money all over France.

PH: It’s a difficult time now. But obviously we believe in what we’ve always believed in — the show must go on and we’ll defend it.

KB: Is there any networking-based collaboration within the fringe theatre scene in France?

FH: We lend our equipment, a lot of people lend us equipment. In that way there’s a lot of exchange. In terms of actually financing other companies — the companies can barely finance themselves.

KB: How do you operate now? Do you mostly put on productions in your village or are you still traveling with your shows?

PH: Well, we’ve just finished an Irish tour a few weeks ago. And our place is always there to receive other companies coming in to produce work and festivals. There was a film festival there this year. At the moment, Footsbarn is in a very difficult situation because there is no finance and therefore we can’t maintain a troupe of actors and artists. Although we still exist, we just produced the show and it toured. We have to work more with projects rather than be constant. We have to be seasonal. But it’s so far away from what we tried to do.

KB: Are there any European funding that could be helpful?

FH: The thing with European funding is that often you have to spend the money before you get it. And also, it requires a lot of hours of paperwork.

PH: It needs a very strong administrator. And we don’t have an administrator. Freddy at the moment does all the paperwork and I do lots of the logistics and the touring side of things. European money is complicated to get.

FH: And you have to fit into what they want. For instance, you can’t just say ‘we have this fantastic idea’, you have to be working with refugees or old people or handicapped people, or it has to have social content that is more important than the artistic one. Before, you just had to have an artistic project. Now it’s like we’re not actually artists but social workers. It almost feels like the artistic content is less important. They want artists to repair society. We feel our work is social in our aim to take theatre to places where there’s no theatre.

PH: We’ve worked with many people from all over the world and we’ve always brought artists from everywhere. But somehow we could do it because in the 80s and the 90s, right up to nearly 2000, Footsbarn was in fashion. So, we could sell shows at a good price, we could get lots of work. Gradually, as the directors of theatres changed and times change, all that is disappearing, nearly gone. The new people want to make their mark, which is natural.

FH: And the other thing that’s happened in France is that before, the directors of theatres would be artists, they would be actors or directors. And now they’re people who are trained in a special school of management, so they’re just like managers and they don’t have their own artistic aesthetic. They get very confused. And there’s a bit like the story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. They talk between themselves: ‘This is a great show.’ So, then they’re like, ‘Oh, yes, this is a great show.’ Or: ‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s terrible.’ And then they’ll all agree. And it’s really difficult because it’s just a matter of whether it fits what they think the show should look like. It can be brilliant, but it doesn’t matter.

KB: Do you believe that it’s the directors who shape the audience’s acceptance to be narrow or is the audience’s acceptance getting actually narrower?

PH: The directors of theatres in France now say, ‘Oh, that can’t go before my public.’ But the public don’t belong to the man running the theatre!

FH: I think the public is more open than the people running theatres. Because, for instance, when we played in Paris, young people came to see us asking: ‘Wow, this, is this new kind of theatre?’. And we’re just doing the same kind of theatre we’ve always done. Obviously, we try and renew ourselves, but we have a style that stays. And the audience is open to it. They’re not so formatted about what theatre should be as the people who run the theatres.

PH: But that’s how it used to be. You didn’t have to convince or sell yourself to the directors; they had trust. Now when you produce something, first you have to do a little bit of work, people come and look at you and judge or form an opinion of your work, and they’ll maybe follow you or maybe they will say ‘no’. It’s like you’re being judged. Because when artists are really free, also from that constant judgement, they’re probably more powerful ultimately. But it all comes to the question of survival after all.

KB: Do you see any opportunities to make the situation better?

FH: If you analyse the total of the budget for culture in France, only 5% goes to the artist. And the rest is administration, the building, maintenance, the technicians.

PH: Help the artists, feed the artists.

FH: And this whole online thing… The Minister of Culture in France gives money for developing online art. This is completely against what we believe. The whole point of theatres is to bring people together, human to human. There are so many screens already. Theatre doesn’t work in any other way than sharing space.

KB: Recently, you’ve developed a play called Remember, about a dystopian place where live performances are forbidden. Is it an expression of your worry about the future?

FH: The play intends to bring to people’s mind the question of what you value in live performance, what you want to preserve for the future.

KB: What do you want to preserve?

PH: Poetry, nature, the light, the dark, live music, life. Films are great, live theatre and music are wonderful. Just allow the artist to really be free.