Making a World

Gomito shows are not of this world. Even if our story starts in a museum, or a street in London for example, it will soon take a trip somewhere else. A visitor to the museum will be transported to a magic land inside a dustbin, or London will be flooded and taken over by sentient fish. We’ve always liked to take people elsewhere, to places we can’t visit in reality.
What’s happening more and more though, I’ve realised, is that the worlds we create are becoming more all-encompassing, they’ve manifested themselves in performance styles and spaces and design which won’t stick to the stage.  In the past couple of years, rather than conjuring our worlds up in a black box theatre we’ve literally chased around a forest, nested in trees, served coffee to audience members, built a nature sanctuary to explore and next up we’re making a weird kind of house for people to come and sit in. Our fantasies are becoming more realistic.
As a person pretty deeply involved in making these shows you would think(/hope!) that I would have noticed this new style at the time wouldn’t you? It might sound a bit haphazard but I’m afraid I can’t say that I did. It just emerged, show by show our fantastical worlds grew bigger and fuller, they pushed reality out the way and wrapped themselves all around us and our audiences.  Looking back with hindsight I have a few theories about how this happened;
 
1.       MADNESS
After 11 years of Gomito we have entirely lost touch with reality. We now consider a nature sanctuary for imaginary creatures to be a perfectly normal part of everyday life.
2.       AGE
We’ve hit our late 20’s and are displaying the theatrical equivalent of nesting behaviour, building increasingly complete worlds in the hope we can live in one one day.
3.       WARM FUZZY FEELINGS TOWARDS AUDIENCES

We want to talk to you. We want to share a space with you. It seems rude to spend an hour in your company without offering you a cup of tea.
4.       SMALL PEOPLE
They don’t suffer traditions which don’t make sense quietly. “Why can’t I go up there?” “Why are the walls black?” “Why are there poles and lights on the ceiling?” Making a few shows specifically for children has taught us a lot about the importance of thinking about every detail of a theatre environment.
5.       ALL OF THE ABOVE….MAINLY POINT 1.
 
This is not to say that we’re heading this way forever, the end point of a journey in this direction would be a film-like naturalism, where we make everything for you and leave no space for your imagination. We’ll be looking to experiment in various degrees of partly-made worlds next, though what they look like I couldn’t tell you right now, I will most likely realise around 3 years after we’ve made them.

Comments are closed.