Everyday Fairytales
Performed across the streets of Cambridge in Christmas 2007, Everyday Fairytales was improvised physical theatre. A company of eight actors created a host of fairytale characters to inhabit Cambridge, making a surreal fantasy world collide with everyday life. Onlookers were free to follow the characters on their separate journeys or just to enjoy the spectacle as they passed them by.
The experience was interesting because it brought home to us two things about outdo
or, non-ticketed theatre:
- It should never, ever be attempted outside in winter. Particularly when most of your costumes are rather skimpy.
- When people are cold and have Christmas shopping to do, they rarely hang around.
Our original idea was to create a random selection of scenes that would intrigue passers-by: strange creatures dancing on Jesus Green, a princess sweeping the streets etc, etc. But we became fascinated by the idea of a continuous story running across several weekends, and so we concentrated on this. Our story involved a prince, a summer queen, a winter queen and her ice minions, the prince’s wolf-like butler and several odd characters who test the prince throughout his quest to defeat the winter queen. It’s safe to say that no-one stopped to watch, although we did get a lot of bewildered and vaguely amused shoppers stopping for a few moments.
Our Wednesday evenings, which stuck more closely to our original idea, were more successful: people stopped and stared at the silent figures moving through the city, playing chess in Starbucks and ordering drinks by writing on a slate.
While the story concept may not have worked out as planned, what we did learn was how to convey a story effectively through physicality only. Next time, we’ll do it in summer. In Spain.
