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Tales of Xenia & How to Be Lost
Tales of Xenia
devised by the company from verbatim transcripts
by Gareth K Vile
C ARTS | C venues at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe | C aquila, Roman Eagle Lodge, 2 Johnston Terrace, EH1 2PW
22-28 Aug at 15:15 (0hr50) Theatre (Verbatim, Physical theatre, Contemporary, Devised) (recommended for ages 8+)
The ancient Greeks believed in Xenia: the concept of helping strangers, offering hospitality to lost travellers. In today’s landscape of bleak newsfeeds and toxic algorithms, Bear Pit Theatre went looking for tales of everyday hope and a brighter worldview.
The laws of Xenia demanded that hospitality, kindness, and generosity were extended to a stranger no matter what their social class or background. So important was this idea to the ancient Greeks that Zeus liked to disguise himself as a poor traveller and call on unsuspecting mortals to test their virtue. They were rewarded if they fulfilled their sacred obligation and faced his wrath if they turned him away.
How to Be Lost
devised by the company from verbatim transcripts
C ARTS | C venues at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe | C aquila, Roman Eagle Lodge, 2 Johnston Terrace, EH1 2PW
22-28 Aug at 14:10 (0hr50) Theatre (Verbatim, Physical theatre, Contemporary, Devised) (recommended for ages 8+)
With maps on every phone, it’s hard to get properly lost in the modern world, but we all have a story of losing our way. Bear Pit Theatre weaves together verbatim tales of misplaced paths and accidental adventures.
These are stories of thrill-seekers in distant lands, bewildered tourists, wandering children, new beginnings and fleeting confusions, of the disorientation and transcendence that redraws trusted maps. This is partly an oral history project, partly an ambitious attempt to recalibrate our sense of place. It’s not a nostalgia trip or a carnival of anecdote or a forced metaphor, but a vibrant collision of chance and calamity, lost paths and hope found, strange meetings and half-forgotten moments.
Because getting lost is so rare, when we do stumble into the unknown there’s a remarkable thrill, some visceral fear and excitement kicks in. Often you’ll become lost when you least expect it. Usually, it’s not a big deal, a momentary glitch, then you’ll check your phone or turn a corner and recognise a landmark. But sometimes you find yourself in a strange place and your mind turns you around and all kinds of possibilities throw themselves up. We view ourselves differently for a moment.
Bear Pit Theatre is drawn to the extraordinary in our everyday lives. They confront what it is to live in these strange times by listening to people’s stories and as these narratives are curated, something organic emerges. Tales of Xenia is devised by the company, weaving the collected stories, focusing on truth and simplicity and merging the verbatim material with physical theatre, dance, Bunraku puppetry and an original score.
Gareth K Vile speaks to Jeremy S Piper
How do you get the puppets involved in the shows? Do they relate to the verbatim scripts?
With our shows I try to use the best medium to relate the story, so we start with the transcripts and find the best way to communicate those words in as truthful and honest a way as possible, offering something of the essence of the person and the story but without relying on a naturalistic approach – with a company of 17 and 18 year olds using the words of people from wildly different ages and backgrounds we try to steer clear of straightforward impersonation. Puppetry is one of the many storytelling tools in the kit. Sometimes, using puppetry allows the young actors to usefully distance themselves from the story – one narrative in How to Be Lost relates the story of one of the company getting lost looking for a theatre; using puppetry discourages self-indulgence in this case and turns a frightening first person account into something more outlandish and fantastical, the puppet directly addressing the audience as a hapless 17 year old, allowing the actors to gently satirise their generation’s dependence on tech and social media. In another case a group of teenage muggers in Tales of Xenia are stripped of their violent aspect and made vulnerable in puppet form. Or there is the poignancy of a woman reflecting on her teenage years as a ballerina – a pursuit she abandoned – interacting with her younger self in puppet form. And puppetry has its practical uses as well – a puppet can cheerfully scale a mountain formed from the rest of the actors!
What is bunraku puppetry and how do the young people learn to do it?
Bunraku is a very old Japanese form of puppetry, whereby three actors manipulate the puppet: one on the head and right hand (or left for Lily, one of our left-handed puppeteers!), one actor on the left hand and back and the final one with the gruelling and quad-torturing role of controlling the legs. The ‘head’ actor is also responsible for the puppet’s breath and voice - breath is everything in this form of puppetry. Japanese Bunraku puppeteers can spend years mastering each aspect of the form. We have to progress much quicker and it’s fair to say that we’re inspired by rather than strictly Bunraku practitioners! The company’s approach to puppetry draws on Flabbergast’s irreverent and playful style – indeed Henry Maynard has delivered workshops for us and indeed made our puppets (who bear an uncanny familial resemblance to those reprobates, Boris and Sergey). Beyond this, we look to Handspring’s ‘principles of puppetry’ but it’s mostly about experimentation and play for our work. I love teaching Bunraku-style puppetry to young people – it is a wholly collaborative form with no room whatsoever for ego; it is physically demanding and, by making everyday movements strange, insists actors explore the character’s physicality and articulation. All these skills are directly applicable to physical theatre at large, but also discourage lazy choices in more conventional naturalistic theatre work. Not all our actors will go on to work in theatre but over the years, many of our alumni have and these puppetry skills are not taught in most British Drama schools. One of our company, a recent BA acting graduate, found himself ahead of his older peers in Nic Hytner’s company manipulating puppets in The Book of Dust.
Where does the inspiration for the shows come from?
The inspiration for the shows very much comes from conversations with the company and through my work as a teacher, engaging with the concerns and hopes of a generation tasked with fixing the mistakes Gen X-ers like me have landed them with. The shows are about listening and not judging. So How to Be Lost started with the simple joy of getting lost in a world dominated by smart phones and satnavs, inspired by the psychology of schemas and the philosophy of thinkers like Rebecca Solnit, but has evolved into something more melancholy reflecting a very 21st century feeling of spiritual loss. Xenia is a more hopeful thesis, emerging from the pervasive gloom that has sought to smother the lives of these bright and generous group of 17 year-olds over the last few years, and looking for hope, a flipside to the usual negative narratives presented to (and about) their generation. This show offers a more generous reading of humanity than that offered by mainstream media, hence the story of a young dancer in Lviv housing displaced people, with a casual disregard for danger and a pervasive, defiantly unheroic generosity, or the story of a British soldier finding warmth and generosity while serving in Afghanistan. It’s also a way in to telling some funnier stories about very drunk people.
Is theatre a good place to explore such urgent and abstract issues?
Absolutely! I’m interested in finding ways to devise original work driven by the young theatre-makers, which is inclusive and collaborative and doesn’t depend on re-hashing the classics, of sending a bunch of young people into the world with a sense that theatre (and art more generally) can – and should – be generous, discursive and not a way to offer up trite easy answers. This is why the work tends to the abstract and the verbatim interviews are curated from a philosophical and intellectual angle. We don’t want the company to trot out a view on an ISSUE (although inevitably big issues do organically emerge from the abstract subject matter) but I do want the company and our audience to start a conversation which will continue long after the shows are done. And hopefully encourage everyone to listen to others more generously and to resist easy answers and simplistic judgements.
This will be Bear Pit Theatre’s tenth year at the Edinburgh Fringe (after missing 2020 and 2021), but the company changes every year and is comprised of sixth form students attending Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, London. In 2022, the school is bringing two companies of ten young people to Edinburgh and their other show, How to Be Lost will also be performed as part of the C ARTS programme. The company has previously staged productions including 35,000 (2019), The First Love Project (2018) and A Compendium of Lost Things (2017).
